A 40-45’ balsam fir fell on my maple trail so it’s going to the sawmill.
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Anyone know anything about sainfoin? I know it is more popular out west, and in europe. I am looking at cover crops and specifically legumes that can penetrate heavy clay depleted soil. I want to stop mowing an area. I figure I might as well try and improve the dirt as well. 
It has a long taproot, which should do it and it flowers. Supposedly it is valued hay similar to alfalfa, and animals like it. It doesn’t cause bloating.
I need to know a lot more weed control and planting and whether I can interplant things like sunflowers which suck up nitrogen and have a long taproot as well.
I am just wondering how weedy it is, and how susceptible to weeds it is, and whether I can get away sowing it directly into the existing grass.
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What about red clover? That is what we use around here to fix nitrogen.
I dont know anything about the plant you suggested. Sorry can’t help there.
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I’ve read some on sainfoin, previous varieties don’t cope well with multiple cuts per year. Otherwise it has numbers of advantages from what I read, especially the no bloat risk.
The best development in sainfoin that I know of is an ag Canada variety called Mountainview, apparently it tolerates mowing and grazing much better. Not sure if it’s available south of the border or can be imported. I intend to source some seed here shortly to try it out.
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It is the same family as alfalfa. The stems are hollow and animals eat them. The contain condensed tannins that prevent bloating. They supposedly have some mild-worming properties for animals as well.
It is a legume. It should be inoculated before planting. (apparently no inoculant is approved for use in Canada.) But the yield was like 4-5 tons (US) dry per acre for year 2+. It is fairly short lived though. 3-6 years depending on how short it gets cut.
In the US there is the Delaney variety that is the newer multicut variety here, which is what I was looking for, but I can’t find anyone selling -that- seed in less then 50lb quantities. I also am reading contradicting reports. like don’t multicrop it, and I found it because it was a part of a multi-crop mix in North dakota. lol
I might end up with something else like sunflowers with hairy vetch intercropped. I wanted to get the clay poked through and full of N before I did that though because sunflowers use quite a few nutrients.
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crimson clover is my backup, but that didn’t do well in the garden when i tried it. I am pretty sure I can get vetch and sunflowers, but I have to till and I was trying not to disturb the soil. I might have to till with sanfoin though too. shrugs
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I would watch out for vetch. If you let it grow too much it is really hard to mow. I have it in my fields it makes good feed for the first cut but nothing on the second cut and if I am too late it gets too twisted up and won’t pass through my mower I end up stopping to clear the clumps.
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I understand the seed is fairly large, so 50 lbs won’t go as far as you may think, polar opposite of alfalfa. As for innoculants, for sure they’re available here, I have a sack of inoculated alfalfa seed here right now.
I think the info you have gathered might be a bit of old and new, the old varieties tended to die out under haying regimes, supposedly the new ones are more tolerant. Alfalfa tends to decline over time anyways, you start with a pure stand in year one and two, but by year 7 or so it’s probably mostly grass. Gophers are hard on alfalfa tap roots too, they have to be controlled or they’ll systematically weed out a stand in short order.
As for aerating clay soil, how about perennial wheat, or fodder beets?
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Yup that is why my uncle and grandfather always went with Timothy clover mix. The neighbor insisted on alpha because he could cut 3 crops but 3 to 5 years out the alfalfa is about gone and it is mostly orchid grass which was planted with it. My grandfather always figured the deep frost killed the tap roots.
In comparison the Timothy clover my uncle planted in the mid 80s is still my best field. I get thick Timothy one year and clover the next depending on how much water there is. The clover definitely likes a little more water. But both make great feed.
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Interesting observation. Here there’s no expectations of a permanent hay stand. Probably a combination of variables, alfalfa so outperforms other forages that it’s worth breaking a field every 7 or 8 years, and at that point it’s good for a grain crop anyways and without additional fertilizer, then back to hay, or it could go to pasture instead for a while, keep the land in rotation, keep the nutrients distributed by the cattle.
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For sure I am reading old and new, because sometimes the old is the only info available.
The study I read was only cut or graze to 8". I do not know whether that changed with the multicut varieties or not.
The Sainfoin inoculant statement came from a 2014 article, so they may have something approved by now. I do not know. I thought the article was more recent when I said that. 
I don’t have any expectations of keeping it around 6 years. If it goes to seed (and you can graze after), it will reseed itself. And chances are I won’t buy enough seed and will have to harvest some anyway.
I was going to follow it in a couple years with radish, then do sunflowers and vetch. I think vetch is the one that does a lot of lateral clay breakage.
I like timothy. I ate a bunch of that when I was a kid. 
All the timothy fields were gone by the 70s except a handful of holdouts.
They had very small operations on like <80 acres with suboptimal soil. Like the guy whose muck field had 2+ft of standing water in it every spring.
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I would say since you considered a 50lbs bag of seed a large purchase that your project would qualify as one of those small operations less than 80 acres.
I wouldn’t be too quick to jump on what the big boys do. There are tradeoffs that come with size. Feed quality is often traded for quantity that can be harvested easily with bigger equipment. Costs like reseeding are often overlooked as when you have access to big equipment and chemicals to kill off the current growth reseeding becomes less of an issue.
Your comment about the guy with 2 plus feet of standing water each spring having Timothy points to a couple of things. It does well in saturated soils which clay tends to be until it gets so dry it cracks and becomes equlivant to cement. But is also reminds me that the sandy edges of my fields are mixed native grasses because the Timothy won’t hold in sand. I would be willing to bet some of those big farms you saw leave Timothy in the 70s did it because the soil was depleted and building it up to something else was easier with big tractors and commercial fertilizer and chemical weed control. The 70s and 80s saw the growth of agro business largely through the use of roundup and other worse chemicals.
All I can do is speak from my own experience if you have clay you have soil with a high organic content that will hold water. Not far from those muck fields you mentioned except that you didn’t collect so much water on your land.
Timothy and clover in my experience like that type of soil and will stay there indefinitely if harvested and top dressed once in a while to keep the nutrients and PH correct. Around here decades of acid rain have been the biggest issue with our soil and lyme is still the best return on investment for depleted land.
But to my way of thinking I will be a holdout i guess and stick with the proven that doesn’t require i reseed every few years with the use of pesticides to kill off the weeds. Timothy clover has worked for that here my entire lifetime with good yields and good feed quality. Maybe there are better yields per acre but the cost of things like alfalfa isn’t worth the return to me.
If I wanted to improve the drainage of clay I would add sand it is cheap and will definitely improve clay soils.
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The problem isn’t finding sanfoin seed in general. It is finding the specific variety of sanfoin. Granted for my general use case it probably doesn’t matter but I know the deer and probably everything else will eat it. I would rather spend a few bucks more and get a multi-cut variety to potentially eliminate problems.
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Certainly, It definitely qualifies as a hobby.
As far as adding sand, I still would have to figure out how to mix it into the 2ft of clay anyway. Not worth my time or money, this is just an experiment.
Alfalfa has 2x the protein and mineral content as timothy. Even the small 10 acre intensive diary did alfalfa.
I’m not criticizing your practice, I am merely stating what happened around here. You nailed why that farmer stuck with it. He didn’t have anywhere else to grow it, and he couldn’t switch to alfalfa. He also could only get like 0-2 cuttings a year. But they were an odd case on really poor land. They were like the 1950s version homesteaders.
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Maybe but around here you cut alfalfa 3 times and get about half the volume per acre off the land as two cutting of Timothy clover. I kid you not my neighbor who has fields that share a border with mine cuts them 3 times and doesn’t get anywhere near the volume off the field and he fertilizers much heavier than I do. But my grandfather always said we where too far north for alfalfa to be viable maybe we have a micro climate in the white mountains of NH that makes it not work out so well.
As to land quality this saco river valley is alway rated best in the state as top quality land. I would dare to say our land probably tests as well as anywhere now get away from our narrow river valley or just a few miles south of me well that is a different story.
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Oh that is easy get some pigs they will definitely work that sand and some fresh fertilizer into the clay for you over the course of the summer.
Just don’t ask how you get it level when they are done…
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Alfalfa does good this far north and quite a ways farther. We had a discussion about this before, my suspicion is alfalfa does better with a consistent winter snow cover. And it definitely doesn’t cope well with flooding conditions.
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We we definitely don’t get consistent snow but we do get consistant flooding… lol
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They are claiming the mountainview can go down to 4" which would be great for me if I can get the clay broken up a bit.
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