Has anyone tried to grow their own Alfalfa hay?
Is the Hay different than the sprouting seeds? Or is it the same and I can just let it grow out to harvest as hay.
yes, it's the same, but now if you buy seeds you might have a choice between Roundup-Ready and the regular kind which has not been fiddled with.
late summer and early fall are good times to plant it as then there is less weed pressure. also it helps to plant it scattered with other plants as it will have some protection until it gets bigger the following season.
i learned all of this by planting it in a garden in the early summer one year and i spent a lot of time weeding. then another year i planted it again as a mixture in the later part of summer and the mixture kept the weeds down and some of the alfalfa sprouts were there the next spring just waiting to take over.
it can take several seasons to get a plant to full size so in the first year you don't want to trim it back too far to allow the plant to get a root down. they do sent roots down pretty far, depending upon your water table and soil. here the water table can be quite shallow at times so the plants i grew normally had roots down a few feet through the mostly clay soil.
after it was full sized plant i cut it sometimes up to three times a season. i used the cuttings for green manure in the gardens and for worm food (in place after cutting i just let the worms in that patch work on it).
the combination of that and birdsfoot trefoil (the agricultural version which can be quite large compared to the roadside wild kind) was a great soil conditioner for that whole area for many years. now the area is being taken over by grass since we've been mowing it instead of me weeding it by hand. i'd like to turn it all into garden space but it takes me a fair amount of work to recoup the sod back to garden along with all the other gardens i keep after. so dunno when i might do it or finish...
aside from the color of the flowers, they smell great when blooming.
oh, and it is not easy to keep a pure stand of alfalfa as the plants will tend to suppress other alfalfa plants from growing really close to each other. so those gaps can be exploited by weeds.
i made the mistake of scattering thousands of bulbules from the garlic i normally grow throughout the alfalfa/trefoil patch and it was always a challenge to harvest and to weed it out once i decided i wanted to get rid of it from back there. mowing after it was taken over by weeds was the easiest answer in the end and we still mow back there until i turn it back to garden space again - a strawberry patch but without a fence the deer eat about everything i try to grow.
