June 4: Birdsfoot Trefoil and Yellow Sweet Clover:

Birdsfoot Trefoil is turning out to be one of my favorite summertime flowers. It's beautiful and has many uses...you often find it along roadsides to control wind and water erosion.

Birdsfoot Trefoil

It's also a good food for Canada geese, deer, and elk, and is used to feed livestock, as a non-bloating legume.  As a dryland pasture legume, it produces 20 percent more growth after July 1 than most dryland grass legume mixtures.


Yellow Sweet Clover is also beneficial, as well as beautiful.

Yellow Sweet Clover

Kalmuks (western Mongols), used to eat Yellow Sweet Clover shoots like asparagus, if the shoots were  young enough. Young leaves can be eaten in salads and the leaves and seedpods cooked as a vegetable. However, only fresh leaves should be eaten because dried leaves can be toxic -- they are used in rat poison.


Leaves release the smell of newly mown hay when drying, and dried leaves can be used as an insect repellent, or used to keep moths from clothing.