![]() (Even scientists goof up occasionally.) Sweet clover has a long history as a renowned honey plant. They chose Melilotus – from Greek words that celebrate honey ( meli-) and lotus, which they somehow thought sweet clover resembles. Long after Aristotle swallowed his last chunk of clover honeycomb, scientists searched for a scientific name to tag to sweet clover. It still attracts bees by the millions to the steep, dry hillsides where it flourishes. I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s blog post, but I’ll spend the rest of today praising the honey bees’ best friend.īeekeepers in ancient Greece recognized sweet clover as a wonderful honey plant. It’s been labeled a noxious, invasive weed. With all this to commend it, you may be surprised to learn that the Canadian government pays summer students (mostly budding ecologists) to destroy sweet clover. Most important of all, I think, is the fact that sweet clover is a fantastic honey plant – one of the best in the world. Those tap roots keep the plant alive during drought, giving noms to wildlife even when the rest of the landscape is burnt and sere. Yet even today, sweet clover’s deep roots prevent erosion on hillsides. Since 1925, sweet clover has been replaced by less natural fertilizer and isn’t seen much in cultivated fields. Surely such a crop, when properly used, has a place on the farms of South Dakota. Its large, deep-growing roots add much valuable nitrogen and vegetable matter to the soil, thus improving the soil on which it grows it endures dry weather and still produces valuable pasture and hay it successfully competes with the weeds that rob our other crops it reduces the acreage of small grain crops and it improves the quality, yield and profit of the crops that follow it. It is a legume and our farms must have more acres of these crops. Sweet clover is a most important crop in a successful system of crop rotation in South Dakota. It has no equal as a combined soil-building, weed-fighting, pasture and hay crop. This deep-rooted, vigorous-growing, hardy, biennial legume surely has a place on South Dakota farms. ![]() SWEET CLOVER was once considered only as a weed, but now it is held a very valuable crop. Here is what Ag scientists told South Dakota farmers in 1925: Farmers once plowed millions of acres of sweet clover into the ground – the plant’s bushy fiber mulched, fertilized, and enriched the soil. Sweet clover replenishes soil, ‘fixes’ nitrogen, as farmers call the process where this element is sucked from the air and stuck into the dirt. The yellow variety brightens the scenery and announces summer. I can’t say enough good things about sweet clover. Making hay from sweet clover, Val Marie, Saskatchewan, 1975. The last time I saw yellow sweet clover intentionally planted in a field was during the 1970s, in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. Planting sweet clover to enrich fields and provide livestock forage has waned. It escaped their fields and spread along the nation’s highways, occasionally helped by other farmers who captured the seeds and planted the weed in their own fields. A century ago, farmers in Indiana and Illinois (and other states) planted sweet clover for hay. Sweet clover is one of the sweetest weeds you’ll ever meet. The yellow biennial (there’s a white variety, too) is an amazing honey plant and was once celebrated as the weed that saved Kentucky from economic ruin, as you will see shortly. It’s wild and it has been reseeding itself, year after year, for centuries. The yellow is from sweet clover that grows and blooms all across the continent. Every June there is a wash of yellow along the edge of almost every highway and trail in North America.
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