COWPEA

It is an annual semi-climber and is often grown interplanted with maize in southern Africa, (where it is called the Kaffir Bean), and with Finger Millet or Ragi (Eleusine coracana) in India.
It is known in warmer Australia as a fodder and green manure plant, but some large garden varieties are worth a try. Cowpeas vary greatly in shape and size.

Plant Names
Botanical Family: 
LEGUMINOSAE
Common Name: 
COWPEA
Genus: 
Vigna
Species: 
unguiculata
About the Name: 

Doctor Vigna was a professor of botany at Pisa, Italy, and unguiculata means "finger-nailed".

Origins: 

The cowpea is thought to have originated in western Asia and reached Africa in prehistoric times. It arrived in Jamaica and southern USA with the slave trade.

Plant Description: 

It is an annual semi-climber and is often grown interplanted with maize in southern Africa, (where it is called the Kaffir Bean), and with Finger Millet or Ragi (Eleusine coracana) in India.
It is known in warmer Australia as a fodder and green manure plant, but some large garden varieties are worth a try. Cowpeas vary greatly in shape and size.

Variety Notes: 

A Queensland subscriber writes:
“I have a large seeded cowpea (forty cm high but not climbing or running) which was grown in the Darling Downs of south-east Queensland in the late forties. It was a number one vegetable; the matured seeds were shelled like dried peas and were light brown in colour and eaten like baked beans. My mother planted a crop each year in September-October to keep a supply of dried cowpeas for the kitchen and we always saved our own seed.”
There is a mottled black-and-white cowpea, which is tasty as well as attractive, in The Seed Savers' Network. Other cowpea varieties have been sent in, largely of American origin, from northern Australia. In south-east Queensland there is one called Black-Eyed Pea.

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