North Carolina’s NC4x Peanut

NC4x peanuts were a variety of groundnut developed by Dr. Walton C. Gregory of North Carolina State University, who had exposed about 200 pounds of peanuts to high doses of x-rays, and planted the into the university’s crop development fields.  “The seed had been badly damaged by the radiation and all sorts of bizarre and distorted forms of plant life showed up in the planting — from perfectly normal plants to some so badly damaged that they would not even bloom and never produced a seed”, but amongst the mutations was a plant that yielded more and larger peanuts than the controls, and it was these ‘daughter’ peanuts that would reach the dinner table of Muriel Howorth, and launch the Atomic Gardening Society.

The NC4x peanut was much larger than normal peanuts.