I don’t know who this question is best for which is why I’m posting it here!
I have several different varieties of Pigeon Pea (PP) and I’m a little bit unsure of how to proceed given the areas we have to plant and our overall strategic goals.
To give a little context we are working in West Africa in a transitional zone from rainforest to the Sahel. It would be best described as an arbored savannah and has 3 months with no rain in the dry season and probably somewhere around 2000mm of rain annually. Our primary goal is to promote PP as an intercrop between cashews for increased income before cashews fruit AND N-fixer to improve soil, lower soil temps, and lower wind speeds. We are also promoting perennials in general. There is one variety that grows locally, but very few people even know what PP is. Even fewer people actually grow PP. Most who know PP are from a different region where it is more frequently grown.
We have two larger planting areas about the size of one hectare each that we would like to plant PP as an intercrop between cashews and other fruit trees. The area with cashews currently only has cashews and 2 varieties of PP but we will be planting moringa as well. The two varieties of PP that we have there are the ‘black’ ones from ECHO and some local white ones that look like they are probably very closely related to the ‘caqui’ ones from ECHO. The caqui ones didn’t start flowering until a couple months ago and we got our first harvest out of them very recently, so 1.5 years or so. It took so long I thought they might be the seeds from hybrids that are sterile. The black ones were much sooner. We planted everything in 2019 and a fire destroyed about 90+% of the PP, but there are still a few that pushed through or were in areas that didn’t get a direct hit by the fire.
The other area will be for a more diverse set of fruit trees and currently only has red PP (I think maybe ‘Georgia-1’) that we got from someone who we met at an ECHO class Dan and Julie in SW FL. Those seeds are much larger and the pods are also much redder.
The two areas are separated by about 1km.
In summary both areas have a small amount of mature plants that have given maybe a total of 10kg total, but we are wanting to increase production significantly in order to distribute seeds for planting to other cashew farmers (and others as well). The main question(s) I have are regarding mixing different varieties in the same field. I don’t know if that is good or bad. My assumption was that it would be better not to mix them and keep them segregated. I’m not sure how segregated different varieties need to be and if that is even the best decision. In addition to the 3 varieties we already have mature plants for, we have a couple hundred seeds of the ‘ICPL 88034 - Early Maturing’ that we’d like to plant. Given that we have 2 fields and 4 varieties and not much seed of the 4th variety I’m not sure what the best plan of action is if we want to get as many seeds as possible with the main criteria for selecting varieties with the shortest time to harvest being the highest priority.
I just read the following: http://oar.icrisat.org/10569/1/68_17105.pdf but a lot of that seemed over my head and I don’t know that we’re looking to go into that much detail yet.
Thanks ahead of time!
Tyler