Depends on what you like. The only cowpeas that my wife will eat are Blackeyes,Pink Eye/Purple Hulls and Big Boys. Blackeyes are mild flavored and some folks prefer the stronger flavored brown peas. Blackeyes in all their manifestations ( Most of them are California followed by a number) California #5 is usually the one sold simply as Blackeye. California # 46 is available from some home gardener sources. The Blackeyes remain the number 1 commercial cowpea. Many homegardeners for their own reasons prefer the similar tasting Pinkeye/Purple Hull varieties. Those really into cowpeas will go for more exotic cultivars like Red Ripper, Pennyrile, Brown Crowders, Black Crowders, Lady, White Acre or the Texas Cream peas. Fortunately Blackeyes are readily available as both dried peas and frozen green shellies so you can test your taste buds before you plant. Be warned tho, the frozen green shellies as not as good as homegrown garden fresh. The Purple Knuckle Hull, a brown crowder that I like,but that my wife will not eat on a bet.

We lived in Indiana when I first began gardening 30 years ago, and I would have been considered an "Upper South" resident before then. So, other than my grandma, I had no experience even eating cowpeas until we landed here in Mississippi twenty years ago. Last year was the very first time I grew cowpeas, and I am so in love with them! (So in love, that I find myself dreaming of them as much as I am craving homegrown tomatoes...Honest!) I grew Mississippi Zipper Creams last year. They are so delicious and very easy to grow. I grow in raised beds that are 8' x 3.5' wide. I planted them about 4 to 5 inches apart intensively in the bed. They did great. They are lovely plants that are bigger than what you normally think of when you think "bush", but they certainly do not need staking. They just kind of put out a "half runner" here and there. One of their charms is they put up a long woody stem, then they bloom and set fruit at the top of the stem (three pods per stem), making picking very very easy. On top of that, the variety I grew changes from green to a light cream color when it's ready to pick. The 8x3 bed was enough to pick about twice a week for about a month. This year, I plan to devote two beds to them so I can stagger them a month apart and have an ongoing supply. Someone may laugh at me, saying I should have left the plants alone. The plants looked quite healthy, but they didn't seem to be blooming, so I pulled them out and planted more. (Would love to hear from someone more knowledgeable if I didn't do this right.) I understand that they can be attacked by Mexican Bean Beetles, but I never saw any last year on any of my bean crops, so cannot comment. My soil was newly worked and amended, and the cowpeas were by far the best producing crop I planted. (I will also say that the Pink Eyed Purple hulls are extremely popular around here too. They're good eating.) Also, like alot of vegetables, the flavor of these peas fresh cannot be compared to them canned or even frozen.

Well, it took a little longer than usual, but my plans finally came together. Like several others here, I am a collector & preservationist, so many of these varieties are not widely known: Beans: ___"Atlas" - from GW swap; bush, medium-large seeds w/coloration very similar to "Cranberry". Dropped by the trade, so I hope to keep it in circulation. ___"Bosnian Pole" - from GW swap w/Remy, from... guess where? ;-) Only had 5 seeds to start with, and only one plant survived squirrel attack last year. Fortunately, that one plant produced lots of seed, so I hope to actually eat some this year, and have seed to swap. Very unusual seed, changes color as it ages... goes from black & buff, to black, buff, and pure white. ___"Brita's Foot Long" - white seeded pole variety, very good quality as a dry bean. Originally from Salt Spring Seeds (Canada), which no longer ships to U.S. Sent a lot of seed out for this, so need to replenish my stock. ___"Chester" - pole, from an SSE swap. Large flat black & white seeds, similar to small limas. Allegedly a good shell bean. ___"Chiclet" - pole, from GW swap with Lynnt earlier in this thread. Medium-large tan seeds that are squarish & white as shellies, hence the name. Originally from Sicily, probably a Romano-type snap. ___"Cornfield, Striped" - pole, from an SSE swap. Small, shiny, very fat red & tan seeds, uncertain as to usage. ___"Emerite" - high-quality pole snap, from Vermont Bean. My other main-crop snap, "Fortex", gets a year off for good behavior. ;-) ___"Jimenez" - pole snap, from GW swap, originally from Thompson & Morgan. 3 of 5 seeds germinated last year, and only one survived rabbit attack (they were really bad last year). Heard good reviews, hope to taste a few this year, and increase my seed enough to share with others. ___"Ma Williams" - pole, from SSE. Outstanding shelly. Like "Brita's", have shared a lot of seed for this, and need to replenish my stock. Main crop shelly. ___"Monterosa" - bush, from USDA. Large black & white seeds, trial as a shelly. ___"Porcelain" (a.k.a. "Snowcap") - pole, from SSE swap. Beautiful large seed, red stripes over buff, with a white "cap" on one end. Trial for use as a shelly. ___"Tetovac" - pole, GW swap, from Serbia. Very large flat white seed, probably Romano-type snap, trial for shelly. ___"Zlatac" - pole wax, from SSE swap. Bronze seed. Cowpeas & yardlongs: ___"Chinese Red Noodle" - yardlong, purple podded, originally from Baker Creek. ___"Galante" - yardlong, green pods, from Philippines. ___"Green Dixie" * ___"MN 13" * ___"Speckled Purple hull" * ___"Stickless Wonder" - bush yardlong, trial for comparison w/ "Yancheng Bush". ___"Thailand Pole" * (Those marked (*) were described earlier in this thread.) Limas: ___"Blue & White Fence" - a.k.a. Old Time Fence, pole type, from SSE, small black & white seeds. ___"King of the Garden" - pole, from Vermont Bean. Large-seeded, my main crop butterbean. Peas: ___"Dunn" - soup ___"Green Arrow" - shell pea ___"Gruno Rosyn" - soup ___"Purple Podded Parsley" - purple podded shell pea, with tiny leaflets in place of tendrils. After crop failures two years in a row due to bad weather, I was able to increase my stock a little last year, and hope to grow enough seed this year to share with others. ___"Plovdivski Podobren" - from Gatersleben, uncertain as to usage. ___"Sandy" - snow pea ___"Sugar Lace II" - snap pea. There's an exception to every rule, and this is the only PVP variety that I grow. Runner beans: ___"Tucomares Chocolate" - pole, from SSE swap, brown-seeded, red & white flowers. This will be my 3rd year of roguing out a white-flowered cross present in the original seed, hopefully this year the seed will be all brown. ___"Sunset Runner" - pole, pink flowers. Soybeans - still TBD, about 20 varieties. Most are the final remnants from the collection of the late Robert Lobitz. Misc: ___Adzuki, "Buff" - good soup bean ___Chickpea, "Brown Popping" ___Garbanzo, "PI 359241" ___Winged bean With our cooler than normal late May/early June, I started many of these in pots, where I would have otherwise direct seeded. Just waiting for a warm, dry day to put them out. Dean, that might work for you; it would give you time to dig up your new lawn. ;-)

Bon, The world of beans and southern peas is incredibly diverse and many of them are multipurpose and can be eaten as snap beans/peas, shelly beans/peas or dried beans/peas. An old southern method of drying them in the pods gives you "leather britches" to store and cook later. Some varieties make better leather britches than others. You'll have a ball exploring the world of legumes. We almost always only eat our home-grown beans and southern peas in the green stage, whether frozen or fresh. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of us sitting on the porch, snapping beans or shelling peas, with glasses of lemonade or kool-aid sitting beside us, while big luna moths flailed around, beating their wings against the screen door beneath the porch light. Now...that is a great childhood memory! Forget Disneyland or Carlsbad Caverns, which were fun in their own way. I treasure simpler memories a lot more. I normally do not dry the beans I raise. Dried beans are as cheap as can be at the store, especially black-eyed peas (although the commercial varieties sold usually are inferior to the pinkeye purple hulls) and pinto beans. I'd rather use the ones we raise as snaps or shellies, which are a lot more expensive at the store than dry beans. A couple of weeks ago we were at Central Market in Southlake and they had shelled fresh pink eye purplehull peas in a container that might have had 10-12 oz. in it and cost either $5 or $6. I tried to imagine what it would cost to buy all the peas I raise annually, and couldn't even imagine it. I grow tons of beans and tons of southern peas. I like diversity so plant many varieties of each. Just in the southern pea category, you have pinkeye purple hulls, crowders, black-eyed peas, zipper peas, lady peas and cream peas, with many named varieties of each. One thing to remember is that heat has the same effect on bean (but not southern pea) blooms that it has on tomato blossoms, so you have to plant them at the right time in spring (April) for a summer harvest, and keep your fingers crossed that the weather won't heat up too early. If you plant late, most varieties won't produce well because they'll be blooming when temperatures are over 90 degrees and a lot of the blossoms will drop without forming beans. You can, however, plant beans again in the mid-summer for a fall harvest. We call those October beans here, with October not being a variety, but rather being the main time you're generally harvesting them. With southern peas, there's tons of varieties and I'm not happy unless I plant at least six kinds every year, but it is okay with me if most of those six varieties are some form of pink eye purplehull. So far I have planted the following southern peas: CT Pinkeye Purple Hull, Pinkeye Purple Hull BVR, Big Boy Pinkeye Purple Hull, Quick Pick Pinkeye Purple Hull, Red Ripper and Mackey (said to be a family selection of PEPH from Louisiana). Still waiting for a spot in the garden? Whippoorwill and Tohono O'odham, The latter is a southern pea from the native people of the southwestern part of the USA. This bean has the black and white markings like a holstein cow and is very drought-tolerant and heat-tolerant. To see a great selection of plants from the Native peoples of this county, check out Native Seed/SEARCH at the link below. With green beans, we eat most of them as snap beans but every now and then I'll grow a variety or two to use as shelly beans. Of course, Lima Beans always are shelled for cooking. I grow 6 to 10 varieties of snap beans every year, but mostly in the fall if the cold weather hangs on deeply into late spring like it did this year. The late cold is too often followed by a quick warm-up that makes bean blossoms fall. We were in the upper 90s today, so with that sort of weather already arriving, I do not have high hopes for my FM1K pole beans that I have growing on the garden fence. They might be able to hang on all summer and produce in the fall though. Regardless, I can plant more in July for a fall harvest if these look too tired from fighting the heat, pests and diseases by then. Your general fall planting dates for legumes here are: Southern peas and Pole Snap Peas July 15-30, Bush Snap Beans and Lima Beans August 10-20. If you plant later than that, you run the risk of losing the peas and beans to frost before they mature. If you plant earlier (and sometimes I risk it in a rainy and cooler-than-average summer), your plants will be subjected to the stress of a lot of extra heat and pests but won't produce earlier unless the weather cools down early (sure, like that is ever gonna happen). You just have to experiment with both beans and southern peas and figure out what types of each your family likes to eat. Experimenting with the different tastes and textures is as much fun as growing them. My family likes to eat the broad/wide Romano-type snap beans, which are a good, meaty bean with a strong beany flavor. A more colorful diet is a more healthy diet, so I grow beans in a huge variety of colors. For this fall I have Tanya's Pink Pod (pink, obviously), and Puriat (purple), Capitano (yellow), as well as Garrafal d'oro (green), and also Purple Dove (purple). Then, in the haricot verts category, I'm growing Slenderette (green), Purple Queen (purple) and Golden Roc d'Or (yellow). I've got Contender and Provider for plain old green snap beans, and Purple Velour for tasty and tender purple snaps for fresh eating only. (They don't freeze well). I've also got Tenderstar for fall, and some Insuk's Wang Kong. Some years I grow some cutshorts and some greasy beans, and I may plant some odds and ends I have left over from previous years for fall, if it manages to rain between now and planting time in July. Pole beans are beautiful and very productive and you don't have to bend or stoop over to pick them, and there's tons of good ones. I usually grow some of the following most years: Rattlesnake, Louisiana Purple Pole, Blue Coco, Jeminez, Cherokee Greasy, Cherokee Cornfield, Garrafal d'Or, Musica, Red-Striped Greasy and sometimes McCaslan or Potomac or other cutshort or greasy bean varieties. Scarlet Runner Beans do not produce well in heat, so are better for fall harvest than summer harvest, and Insuk's Wang Kong is the one I've grown for several years now. I never get a great many beans from them, but usually plant them to climb my 12-foot-tall ornamental windmill and the hummingbirds love their blossoms. Don't forget Lima Beans. There is so much more to Lima Beans than just plain old green ones. I like to grow all kinds of butterbeans, include Violet's Multicolored Beans, Worcester Indian Red, Henderson Bush Bean and Christmas. While most snap beans are either bush form or vining form, there's some that are somewhere in between and they usually are called half-runners. Some half-runners I've grown get taller than bush beans but not quite as tall as pole beans if they have nothing to climb. Give them something to climb, though, and some of the half-runners climb almost as tall as traditional pole beans. In this category I usually grow State Half-Runner or Mountaineer Half-Runner. We haven't even discussed yardlong (asparagus) beans (which are more like southern peas than traditional beans), or dried beans. I usually grow the red asparagus beans. With dried beans, I like to grow Borlotto Tongue of Fire or Signora della Campagna. And we haven't touched on moth beans, tepary beans, fava beans or Edamame (soybeans). All the talk of pinkeye purplehull jelly makes me smile and brings back fond memories. As with tomatoes, there's thousands of bean varieties and at least a few dozen varieties of southern peas, so you can explore them forever and never run out of new varieties to try. John Withee collected and save just under 1,200 bean varieties. I cannot even imagine all the work it took to raise them and save the seeds and keep all those varieties pure. Oh, and there's rice beans too. The bean world is endlessly fascinating, and my favorite bean varieties change constantly depending on which ones had the best flavor and productivity in any given year. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: NativeSeeds/SEARCH