Lablab

Our garden food plot had been planted in the fall of 2007 and failed in the very dry weather. I had overseeded in the spring and the wet cold spring didn’t provide good conditions to bring this plot back so I decided to go ahead and put a summer annual in this plot.

On June 11th I disked the plot and applied 50 pound of 10-20-20 fertilizer and 160 pound of lime. This is about one half ton of lime per acre in our small plot. I sowed the lablab and then dragged the ground and followed this up with a light disking with our small disks.

The lablab grew well but was sparser than I thought it should have been. It grew through June and the deer moved in and cleaned it up in July. By late July grass had come on strong and there was very little lablab left.

In the fall I planted two other plots in clover and also sowed some lablab seed along with the clover. This worked quite well. The lablab shot up and was eaten by the deer while the clover was still young and establishing.

Our experimentation with lablab has shown that for us, planting as a stand alone crop probably isn’t the best use of this crop. We had more success using it as a tasty treat in a young clover plot.

The lablab we used was from BioLogic.

You can purchase lablab seed at Cabela's.

This is a picture of the lablab plot in late June. You can see that the lablab was sparse. The green strip on the left is a small strip of clover.