500 Cowpeas Seed (vigna unguiculata) AKA Field Peas,Stock Peas and Southern Peas 500 Cowpeas Seed (vigna unguiculata) AKA Field Peas,Stock Peas and Southern Peas Cowpea non-GMO ancient Heirloom 300 Organic vegetable seeds Produces well even when it is too hot and humid for snap beans. Pods are held on a short vine and mature in about the same time as okra. May be eaten whole when young or shelled for their seeds when mature. Vigorous vines 3 to 3 1/2 feet with runners. Long narrow pods, filled with edible peas good either green or dried. Cowpea is one of the most ancient crops known to man. Its origin and subsequent domestication is associated with pearl millet and sorghum in Africa. It is now a broadly adapted and highly variable crop, cultivated around the world primarily for seed, but also as a vegetable (for leafy greens, green pods, fresh shelled green peas, and shelled dried peas), a cover crop and for fodder. Cowpea has a number of common names, including crowder pea, black-eyed pea and southern pea. Origins , Africa where it's still cultivated to this day. It sustains the people who live on the very edge of existence and it thrives in hot, dry conditions.Brought across the Atlantic to the Caribbean Basin, it was introduced to the Americas during this dark portion of our history. There are records of its use in Jamaica as early as 1675. It has documented use in Florida in 1700 and North Carolina in 1714. Cowpeas were often known as a "poor man's" food; the landed gentry of the Eastern seaboard preferred the English Pea,Pisum sativum and considered the cowpea simply that: peas grown to feed the cows. George Washington imported 40 bushels of what he called "pease" from Jamaica in 1797 to plant in his fields for forage, but no record exists that he actually sampled them himself.