Tobacco, peanuts grow in Illinois man's garden

SPRING VALLEY, Ill. -- Flowers of all shapes and sizes surrounded Larry Smith's house in Spring Valley this past summer, but what usually caught people's eyes was the 5-foot-tall tobacco plant.

"They'll get out, and they'll stand there and look at it," said Smith earlier this year. "Sometimes I tell them what it is, and sometimes I tell them just to watch."

Smith grew up on a farm in Southern Illinois, so watching plants grow just came naturally. A while back he decided to plant peanuts, cotton and tobacco just to see if he could do it.

He knew tobacco was harvested in Wisconsin, so that wasn't going to be a problem, and he remembered planting peanuts on his old farm. The cotton was the big experiment.

"Until I got the plants coming along pretty good, I didn't tell anybody what I was doing," Smith said.

Where most people plant gladiolus or mums, tried for the exotic, and the Southern plants flourished under Smith's care. The peanut plants ran along the bottom of his garden, with the nuts growing below ground. The huge leaves of the tobacco plant dwarfed the nearby cotton bolls.

Smith attributed his success to a half gallon of potting soil per plant and a lot of tender loving care.

"I just like to take different plants and see if they will make it," Smith said.

Cotton seeds are about the size of a pea and are found inside the pockets of cotton in the boll. Smith didn't plan on making any new shirts from his cotton. Instead, he planned to cut the burst bolls and put them in vases for his wife and their friends.

Smith sent away to the United Kingdom for the minuscule tobacco seeds. The seeds are so small they look like flecks of pepper.

"You could put a thousand tobacco seeds on your thumbnail," Smith said.

Smith said he could conceivably take the time to cure the tobacco and roll his own cigars, but the process is complicated and time-consuming. Smith said he instead planned to cut down the mature plants and hang up the dried leaves as a novelty.

The peanuts would be much easier to get rid of once the half-bushel crop had matured.

"My niece, she already came by and got a plant," he said. "She stood there in the garage and ate every peanut off that plant."

Master gardener Joe Temple of the University of Illinois Extension gets questions from amateur gardeners every day. Most are about what kind of pest is eating their tomato plant, or what they can do to prevent their plant from dying.

Temple said he couldn't remember anyone in the area who tried to grow tobacco or cotton.

"That would be more or a novelty than anything else," Temple said.

While the growing season is a little different in the Illinois Valley than it is in the South, Temple said such plants should not have too much trouble growing in the area.

In fact, many of the insect predators that destroy the plants, like the cotton boll weevil, are not found in the area.

"I wouldn't worry about insects," Temple said.

Smith said that other from a few earwigs he hasn't had any insect problems. He said he now plans to grow at least some of the plants again next year.