FOOD & DRINK
- life
Sweet smell
of success...
Look out this year for fields densely
covered by six foot tall, clover-leaved
plants giving off wafts of a sweet,
vanilla scent.
American Sweet Clover is often
used in game cover mixtures
but also sown on its own, you’ll
also notice honey bees and
other insects gathering pollen
and nectar. Some of these
waving, yellow carpets may
be surrounded by bee hives.
You’ll have just found your
first field of American sweet
clover which the Island’s leading
apiarist Terry Willis will tell
you can produce quantities
of clear, clover honey.
Besides using it in game
cover strips, garlic farmer Colin
Boswell is sowing sweet clover
on set aside land destined for
organic conversion for his garlic
crop. It provides heavy cover
to suppress other weeds, fixes
some nitrogen into the soil and
generally improves fertility. Its
attraction to bees is an added
blessing for beekeepers.
In the USA, back in the Great
1930s Depression, farmers
in the mid west used sweet
clover similarly as a cheap way
to maintain fertility on non
productive land, looking forward
to the day when it could be
returned to
profitable
cropping. So
much was
grown that the
price of honey
collapsed
worldwide
as farmers
sought to
extract extra
income
from land.
Honey
and sweet
clover are
an obvious connection but the
next part of the story is the most
interesting – Farmers cut the tall
crops of sweet clover and dried
them as hay to feed their cows,
particularly in the g &VBF