Innovative ways of growing cowpea in a city home!

Growing vegetables at home has always been my pet hobby over the decades. I used to grow a lot of them at my parents’ home where we had enough space to grow multiple types of vegetables and fruits and it was a good old time. Decades later, I am in a city home with very little space around and whatever space is there, it is paved with concrete tiles. Hence most of my vegetables are grown in garden pots filled with ready made potting mixture which contains mud, coco peat and dry cow dung powder, bought from local nurseries. Shrub vegetables like Okra are easy to grow in garden pots. But climbers are always a problem and needs innovative methods. I am using an electrical wiring pipe for the cowpea vines to climb up. There are two such plants in a single garden pot of about 11 inches diameter. You can see chinese potato plants with small leaves in plenty in a nearby pot and a brinjal plant with larger leaves as well. Chinese potato plants are growing in pots filled with surplus sand at home.

Here is a larger 23 inch garden pot in which another electrical wiring pipe has been used for growing cowpea plants. Incidentally, cowpea seeds were the ones chosen by Indian Space Research Organization to successfully germinate under microgravity in a spacecraft recently. The wooden piece with a design which you see by the side was retrieved from an old skimmer. There is one more tiny cowpea plant hidden by the larger one, which I intend to spread on to the ‘skimmer stick’. You can see that the older leaves of the cowpea plant has been affected by leaf miners eating away the green part and producing designs. Fortunately, the newer leaves had not been affected yet. In the background you can see chinese potato plants in another garden pot and curry leaves plant on the floor covered with baby gelly as a form of mulching to reduce the growth of weeds. Had to remove a few concrete tiles to plant them some time back, but the growth has not been that good. Growth of plants in garden pots seems to be better.

This garden pot illustrates other innovations. I had planted Okra plant before sowing the cowpea seeds in the hope that they will grow tall and give support to cowpea vines. But somehow their growth have not been up to the mark and the cowpea plant which started much later, has overgrown the Okra plant. So I had to spread the cowpea vine on to my layered grape vine nearby. This grape vine was successfully layered from the parent grape vine located about four feet away and is now growing independently. Okra plant is also showing a spurt of growth now, with several fresh leaves. Chilli plant is also there in the nearby garden pot.