Clover Seed

Description

Organic clover seeds!  Can be used for sprouting and eating (they are pretty much indistinguishable from alfalfa sprouts) or for garden/yard use.

In your kitchen, clover seeds can be sprouted in a jar on your counter in just a few days and then tossed into salads, added to sandwiches, or for anything that needs some extra green-and-crunch.  A wonderful way to avoid imported-from-far-away lettuce in Manitoba winters.

Outside the kitchen, red clover can be a great way to add variety and pollinator friendly forage to low-maintenance areas.  I’ve used it for walking paths, stabilizing dugouts and ditches, around trees or perennials, or sprinkling into established lawn.  The seeds are not inoculated, so it is important that there is already a robust network of mycorrhizal fungal in your soil to support growth.  After the clover is established, it will contribute mycorrhizae to the soil which will benefit other plants around it, but needs a bit of a boost to get going.  If you purchase red clover seed from a ‘normal’ seed supplier it will usually be inoculated in advance, but this clover seed is not.

The red clover is grown on our farm, and is the primary food source for our honeybees.  As the bees collect nectar from the flowers, they also pollinate them, which is what allows them to set seed.  We are moving much of our farm’s hay production over to clover in order to minimize our need to export nutrients in the form of hay.  It’s still a struggling enterprise for us, as our combine likes to spit the clover seeds out the backend instead of harvesting it, so our yields this year were pretty paltry, but enough to fill sprouting jars even if it won’t be enough for us to to plant hundreds of acres….

A note on sizes:  150g is enough for about 10 jars of sprouts (I used a heaping tbsp, or 15g, for the bowl of sprouts shown in the product image).  We seed our fields at about 10lbs/acre (there are a lot of seeds in a pound!), so 1lb is enough for most yard/garden projects.