Bird’s-foot Trefoil Seeds (Lotus corniculatus)

Lotus corniculatus

Bird’s-foot trefoil, also known as eggs-and-bacon, Lady’s slipper, or horned clover: its nickname “bird’s-foot” comes from its pods, grouped in threes or fours at the top of the stem and spread out like the toes of a bird’s foot. A small native legume, discreet but vital to meadow biodiversity.

Characteristics:

• Yellow flowering: small, bright yellow pea-like flowers, often tinged with orange, from May to September.
• Spreading perennial: a spreading habit that forms a dense, long-lasting ground cover.
• Nitrogen fixer: like all legumes, it naturally enriches the soil.

Sowing advice:

• Exposure: full sun.
• Soil: truly all types, even poor, dry, stony, or calcareous soils — it is one of the most frugal plants there is, capable of colonizing even the most inhospitable banks and roadsides. No fertilization: it produces its own nitrogen.
• Method: sow directly in the ground in spring or autumn, broadcasting over scratched soil, then firm it down. No soaking or stratification is necessary. See how to sow your seeds.

Maintenance advice:

• None. It tolerates trampling, mowing, and drought without flinching, and comes back every year.

Beneficial combinations:

• Mixed in a meadow with white clover and alfalfa, it creates a highly complete legume cover that enriches the soil sustainably. See green manures.

Benefits for biodiversity:

• It is one of the most important host plants in our meadows: the caterpillars of several dozen butterfly species feed on it, including the Common Blue and many other blues.
• Its flowers are highly attractive to pollinators and are especially visited by bumblebees, which are powerful enough to open its closed corolla.
• Its dense root system effectively stabilizes banks and eroded soils — see our seeds for poor, dry soil.

Uses:

• Flower meadows, ground cover, green spaces, pathsides, and bank stabilization. It is also an excellent forage plant, valued in extensive grazing.

Harvesting your own seeds:
Let a few pods turn brown and dry on the plant, but harvest them before they open: when ripe, they suddenly twist and project the seeds some distance away. See how to store your seeds.

Commitment to Quality: at SemiSauvage - Permaculture, we grow and select our seeds with respect for living things as our guiding principle. Based near the Auvergne Volcanoes, we choose reproducible, non-hybrid varieties, tested for their germination rate, carefully sorted and packaged, with no chemical treatment whatsoever. Our belief: to give gardeners back the ability to resow, year after year, seeds that truly belong to them.

Give your meadow a butterfly nursery with these bird’s-foot trefoil seeds.