Mavuno Cowpea

Mavuno cowpea is a remarkable cover crop variety of cowpea! Over the years we have experimented with many dozens of legume varieties and this is by far the most impressive variety we know of for intercropping with young trees and other perennial crops. It is the only variety of cowpea we are aware of that has the vigor and rampancy of cover crop types but sprawls as a mat, with no desire to climb adjacent plants. The growth habit is analogous to sweet potato, a sprawling vine that grows right up to young trees without climbing them. The occasional rare shoot “ramps” up into another plant but this is minimal and easily mitigated. It is extremely rampant with individual plants growing a mat 15 feet or more in diameter if left unpruned and seems totally resistant to nematodes. The stems are strangely thick, unlike other forms of cowpea. This variety has huge potential for restoring degraded soils around young plantings. It has high nitrogen fixing abilities, which we discovered by digging a hole nearby and finding ample N-fixing nodules covering the roots. This variety has grown aggressively (with some help and watering during establishment) on an area of our farm with poor, sandy soil that hardly supports native grasses. Going forward, planting Mavuno will be our primary strategy for keeping the ground covered, suppressing weeds and building fertility in our orchard plantings where soil is extremely poor.

Mavuno is a day-sensitive variety, meaning pods will not begin to set until the shorter days of Fall. Our first dry seed harvest came in the last two weeks of August. After fruiting begins, a trickle of pods continues with indeterminate production. Pods seem fibrous and inedible to eat as a snap bean. Shelled fresh peas can be eaten like black eyed peas and dry beans can be cooked and eaten as a bean. There is one fatal flaw to this variety we discovered years ago growing this variety at the HEART Village. It is extremely susceptible to cowpea curculio, which destroyed most of the seed crop where that pest was present. At Cody Cove Farm we do not seem to have this pest. Large pods contain as many as 18 seeds.

Mavuno means “harvest” in Tanzania, where this variety originates. We originally acquired this variety through our friends at ECHO. We encourage all customers to take a tour of ECHO and financially support their critical work in global hunger relief. If we are momentarily sold out of this variety, it is probably best not to bother ECHO for seed as the majority of their seed production is for international development workers and their quantities can be very limited.

30 seeds

Vigna unguiculata