Lablab

In the spring of 2008 I decided to buy some lablab to see if I could get a nice lush plot of beans for the deer to snack on through the summer. I’ll be honest here and admit that I knew that the deer would quickly devour a lush plot of beans, but this would still provide a good nutritious burst of food for the deer.

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.

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.

Return from the Lablab Review to the Food Plot Seed Page.