I'll keep my fingers crossed that you get more pods. Thanks for the update.
Oh THAT one has plenty of pods (at least another 12); I've never had a problem with the Fort Portal Violet. It's the Mottled Grey that gives me a headache!
At the moment I'm just hoping that at least one of the flowering cowpeas is an Owl's Eye (my working name for the mottled eye cowpea I get out of the mixed bean bags from the Korean company). The odds are pretty good there I think, since I seem to recall that, out of the 20 or so cowpea plants that were NOT Owl's Eye I put in as seedlings; as opposed to direct seeding which I did for OE since I (at the time) had so much, only one actually made it. So the fact that there are two that have flowers speaks of pretty good odds. And I'm pretty confident that OE CAN produce seed here. I've distributed seed of it's bag sibling (exactly the same except that the eye is flat orange brown) to some others on the board and it did SPECTACULARLY for them. And while I often forget it, the facts is that I DID get an OE to make a pod or two way back when I was starting, it just that was really early in my growing career and I pulled the pod too soon, so the resultant seed wasn't quite ripe enough to be viable when I planted it the following year.
Actually I expect that odd one out is probably the one next to it, since it has slightly different traits than the others. It's darker green, glossier, bigger, and beginning to climb, all of which are traits more in line with some of the black seeded ones, and that's what most of the seedlings were black seeds (with one or two speckled browns). The only catch is that last one, since the one time (last year) I had a black that actually made a vine, it never actually made any flowers, it just grew to ridiculous lengths (my flowering cowpeas grow quite short, as a rule). But the space is wide enough that I am willing to let it be and hope. One good thing out of this year with everything in the stump so short and sparse, at least there is no shortage of poles for those that climb. Though I do find a touch of irony in the fact that this is the first year I remembered to pull up the tall weed that sprouts there (most years I forget, and by the time I think it will be a problem, the rice beans have climbed all over it and I have to leave it alone in order to keep them safe) and it looks like this is also the first year I probably didn't have to! (oh well everyone I pull up is one that wont make seed to re-infest the area next year, so I'm making my future easier.)
