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Vigna unguiculata subsp. unguiculata
Also called Southern pea
A warm-season legume grown for its edible beans, a subspecies of cowpea. It is an annual that needs warm soil and is very drought tolerant.
The black-eyed pea or black-eyed bean is a legume grown around the world for its medium-sized, edible bean. It is a subspecies of the cowpea, an Old World plant domesticated in Africa, and is sometimes simply called a cowpea.
The common commercial variety is called the California Blackeye; it is pale-colored with a prominent black spot. The American South has countless varieties, many of them heirloom, that vary in size from the small lady peas to very large ones. The color of the eye may be black, brown, red, pink, or green. All the peas are green when freshly shelled and brown or buff when dried. A popular variation of the black-eyed pea is the purple hull pea or mud-in-your-eye pea; it is usually green with a prominent purple or pink spot.
In non-tropical climates, this heat-loving crop should be sown after all danger of frost has passed and the soil is warm. Seeds sown too early will rot before germination. Black-eyed peas are extremely drought tolerant, so excessive watering should be avoided.
The crop is relatively free of pests and disease. Root-knot nematodes can be a problem, especially if crops are not rotated. As a nitrogen-fixing legume, fertilization can exclude nitrogen three weeks after germination.
One 100 g serving of cooked black-eyed peas contains 484 kilojoules (116 kilocalories) of food energy and is an excellent source of folate and a good source of thiamine, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc. The legume is also a good source of dietary fiber (6.5 g per 100 g serving) and contains a moderate amount of numerous other vitamins and minerals (table).
Moth bean · Adzuki bean · Hairypod cowpea · Black gram · Mung bean · Bambarra groundnut · Rice bean · Catjang · Asparagus bean · Cowpea · Cowpea
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Black-eyed pea 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.
