Cowpeas

(Vigna unguiculata)
I love cowpeas, thanks to three years of my childhood being spent in Cambodia where green cowpeas (usually called yard-long beans) were my favourite fresh vegetable (I should probably confess that, as a picky eater involuntarily landed in a completely different food culture by his parents, I seized on cowpeas as one of the few vegetables which looked enough like the things we grew in good old Canada to be worth eating!). I still like them. Cowpeas also make a good dry legume (sometimes called black-eyed peas or lady peas), which have the significant advantage over many others of not needing soaking before cooking because of their small seeds.

  • Grey Seed Adzuki cowpea Quick View
    • Grey Seed Adzuki cowpea Quick View

    • Grey Seed Adzuki cowpea

    • $4.00
    • (Vigna unguiculata) An unfortunate name, because of the risk of causing confusion over which species this is; as far as I can tell, it is a cowpea. Bush plants produce lots of slim pods filled with tiny, speckled grey seeds. 115 days to maturity. 60 seeds/packet.
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  • Guatemalan cowpea Quick View
    • Guatemalan cowpea Quick View

    • Guatemalan cowpea

    • $4.00
    • Sprawling bush-with-runner type plants might benefit from a short trellis, but don’t need it. Very long pods are filled with beautiful speckled brown seeds. Two things intrigue me when I look at these seeds. One is morphological: the patterning on these seeds initially looks similar to that on a pinto bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). However, on closer inspection, there is an interesting difference; the speckling is not random. On a pinto,…
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  • MN 13 cowpea Quick View
    • Out of Stock
      MN 13 cowpea Quick View

    • MN 13 cowpea

    • $4.00
    • (Vigna unguiculata) The best-adapted cowpea for the north which I have found. Dwarf plants extend flower stalks well above their leaves, so that the pods stay off the ground as they mature. Seeds are half black and half white (a “Holstein type” cowpea). MN 150 and MN 13 were developed by David W. Davis of the University of Minnesota with the aim of producing short-season cowpeas for northern growers. They…
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  • 21 Peas cowpea Quick View
    • Out of Stock
      21 Peas cowpea Quick View

    • 21 Peas cowpea

    • $4.00
    • (Vigna unguiculata) A pole variety; give it a trellis 8’/2.6 m tall. Seeds are large for cowpeas and a beautiful dull brick-red. “21 Peas” stretches the truth only slightly; our average was closer to 17 seeds per pod, but the long pods do make for quick and easy shelling. Rather long-season for our climate, but still matures a reasonable amount of seed, and might do better if started indoors and…
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  • Fagiolina del Trasimeno cowpea Quick View
    • Out of Stock
      Fagiolina del Trasimeno cowpea Quick View

    • Fagiolina del Trasimeno cowpea

    • $4.00
    • (Vigna unguiculata) A landrace native to the area around Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, in central Italy. Plants which happily fill a 5’/1.6m trellis are covered with flowers which daily perform a neat colour transformation: each afternoon the blossoms of the next day’s flowers swell, showing their yellow outsides; then when you return in the morning they have opened to reveal white or pale purple flowers which fall by afternoon, repeating…
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