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Develop Cowpeas for Meals Resilience
by Desirée Fleck of Squires, MO
Cowpeas, also referred to as Southern peas or Vigna unguiculata, are a genus of beans that everybody within the center and southern States must find out about. They’re a super-easy-to-grow, versatile, nutritious, extremely edible household of beans that features many cultivars of heritage, heirloom, and landrace flavors. Some you will have heard of earlier than are the Black-eyed pea, Crowder pea, and Asparagus Bean which is an in depth relative from Asia. Similar to inexperienced beans, there are vine and bush styles of the cowpea, so hold that in thoughts when selecting which varieties to develop.
As I discussed earlier than, they’re super-easy to develop and so they can simply produce sufficient meals to be thought of a staple crop. Plant them beginning in early Could when the bottom has begun to heat up, and hold planting into late June. We love to do successive plantings of them to maintain them going all season lengthy. Typically we are going to plant cowpeas right into a mattress that has been not too long ago harvested of early spring veggies like radishes or lettuce. They’re a nitrogen-fixing plant, like all legumes, so additionally they make an amazing cowl crop or inexperienced manure. They aren’t very choosy about soil situations so virtually any backyard mattress or plot can be simply superb. An excessive amount of nitrogen already current within the soil might find yourself rising a number of inexperienced and never a lot bean. Plant them 4-6 inches aside if you’re doing a monoculture of cowpeas, or give them a bit of further house in case you intend so as to add companion crops to the combination. You may develop them in a Three Sisters planting with corn and squash. They will also be interplanted with okra, melons, cucumbers, and strawberries. We love to incorporate cowpeas in our perennial/permaculture plantings and so they normally thrive in quite a lot of guilds. Final yr we had some climbing up Slippery Elm timber, up our Asian Pear, round some False Indigo and in numerous different spots. They appear to get alongside very well in most locations. They develop in a short time and they aren’t massive “house hogs” so that they make an amazing dwelling mulch, vining or bushing amongst different crops.
After you plant them within the floor, water them or let the rain do it. They’re a drought-tolerant crop originating from Africa, so that they require little to no irrigation. Sure, a staple crop you’ll be able to simply develop that you don’t even have to water!
Wish to know one other beauty of cowpeas? The entire above-ground plant is edible! You may harvest the beans like snap inexperienced beans the place you’ll be able to eat the entire younger, tender pod; like shelling peas the place you harvest the immature bean seed from the hull and put together them like inexperienced peas, or allow them to utterly dry out for dry beans you can take pleasure in all winter lengthy and past. However not solely are the beans edible, the stems/vines and leaves are edible too! They are often loved just like Austrian Winter Peas, both uncooked in a salad or cooked.
We have now grown a number of varieties and saved seeds from all of them together with Zipper Cream, Queen Anne blackeye pea, Whippoorwill, Crimson Ripper, Pink Eye Purple Hull, and so they all did nice. We’re very excited to plant cowpeas many times. This yr the aim is to provide sufficient cowpeas to take pleasure in many pots of them over the winter and save sufficient to plant much more subsequent yr.
So there you’ve got it. Should you didn’t already find out about cowpeas, you do now and if in case you have the house, I extremely advocate that you simply develop some!
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