The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Vigna unguiculata
Also called Blackeyed pea, Reeve's Pea, Snake Bean, Black Eyed Pea, Cuckold's Increase, Southern Pea, Twin Flower
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is an annual legume grown for its edible seeds, pods and leaves, with many varieties ranging from short bushes to climbing vines. It thrives in hot, dry conditions and sandy soil, and its nitrogen-fixing roots make it a useful intercrop.
The cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is an annual herbaceous legume from the genus Vigna. It can be erect, semierect (trailing), or climbing. A high level of morphological diversity is found within the species with large variations in the size, shape, and structure of the plant. Four subspecies are recognised, three of which are cultivated.
Its tolerance for sandy soil and low rainfall have made it an important crop in the semiarid regions across Africa and Asia. It was domesticated in Africa and is one of the oldest crops to be farmed. A second domestication event probably occurred in Asia, before they spread into Europe and the Americas.
Cowpeas thrive in poor dry conditions, growing well in soils up to 85% sand. This makes them a particularly important crop in arid, semidesert regions where not many other crops will grow. As well as an important source of food for humans in poor, arid regions, the crop can also be used as feed for livestock. Its nitrogen-fixing ability means that as well as functioning as a sole crop, the cowpea can be effectively intercropped with sorghum, millet, maize, cassava, or cotton.
The optimum temperature for cowpea growth is 30 °C (86 °F), making it only available as a summer crop for most of the world. It grows best in regions with an annual rainfall between 400 and 700 mm (16 and 28 in). The ideal soils are sandy and it has better tolerance for infertile and acid soil than most other crops. Generally, 133,000 seeds are planted per hectare (54,000/acre) for the erect varieties and 60,000 per hectare (24,000/acre) for the climbing and trailing varieties. The seeds can be harvested after about 100 days or the whole plant used as forage after about 120 days.
Cowpea seeds provide a rich source of proteins and food energy, as well as minerals and vitamins. This complements the mainly cereal diet in countries that grow cowpeas as a major food crop. A seed can consist of 25% protein and has very low fat content. Cowpea starch is digested more slowly than the starch from cereals, which is more beneficial to human health. The grain is a rich source of folic acid, an important vitamin that helps prevent neural tube defects in unborn babies.
Moth bean · Adzuki bean · Hairypod cowpea · Black gram · Mung bean · Bambarra groundnut · Rice bean · Catjang · Asparagus bean · Black-eyed pea · Cowpea
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cowpea by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
