Rare Purple Clover: Good for the Soil, Animals, and Human Body

In addition to being beneficial to the soil where it is grown and the animals who graze on it, rare purple clover can also be consumed by humans and has several benefits for the body, too.

Purple Clover

The huge, pinkish-purple clover that grows on lawns, meadows, and by the sides of roadways is known as red clover or purple clover.

Native to Eurasia, it was brought to North America by the middle of the sixteenth century.

Purple clover may have a familiar outward aspect, but it differs from other grass plants in some ways. It is a perennial with a short, robust base, upright, many branches, and hairless or hairy stems.

Good For The Soil:

Red clover works as a cover crop to lessen erosion.

To preserve the quality of aquatic environments, which are necessary for fish and other aquatic creatures to survive and prosper, it is crucial to keep topsoil out of streams.

Red clover, like other members of its family, fixes or transforms atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can utilize as a nutrient. As a result, it is frequently used as a cover crop, or "green manure," to improve soil fertility.

Good For Animals

Bees with lengthy tongues, such as bumblebees, visit flowers in search of honey and pollen.

Additionally, a variety of butterflies and moths stop by the blossoms. Numerous other insects, including the eastern tailed-blue, the clover looper, the orange, clouded sulphur, cloudless, and southern dogface sulphurs, as well as butterfly and moth caterpillars, eat the leaf.

Red clover is also a source of nourishment for several species of leaf beetles, weevils, aphids, treehoppers, stinkbugs, and grasshoppers.

Numerous animals such as voles, groundhogs, rabbits, ground squirrels, bears, deer, and others consume foliage, blooms, or both.

Additionally, red clover foliage, blooms, and/or seeds are consumed by Canada geese, larger prairie chickens, wild turkeys, and ruffed grouse.

The sparrows, mourning doves, and horned larks, are a few of the smaller species that consume the seeds.

Red clover is a crucial forage and fodder crop, however, it may also make animals bloated if they consume too much of its new growth. Red clover consumption may contribute to sheep infertility.

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Good For The Human Body

More parts of the planet than any other Trifolium species are home to the red clover plant. It was presumably first cultivated in the third or fourth century in Spain, and from there, it probably moved to Holland, Lombardy, and then Germany. It was first brought to England in 1645, and by 1663, the English had transported it to the New World.

Red clover flowers were historically used to flavor vinegar and add taste to teas and jellies. A range of other medical uses for the plant includes use as a component in cough syrup as well as salves to treat skin and eye conditions.

It's possible to prepare the young foliage as a vegetable. In times of scarcity, pulverized dried flower heads have been added to loaves.