Re: [nafex] Weed fabric

[jhecksel@voyager.net]

Bruce & Joyce wrote:

> Kevin,
> Red clover has medicinal qualities and is marketable as an herb.

<snip>

> So if you grow red clover, you also get the benefits of the flowers for your
> bees and the herbs for your wife's health and maybe can market the herb to
> benefit your pocketbook.

An interesting site to visit is
http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/plants.html

Dr. Duke (yes, his real name) has a database of the naturally occuring chemicals
that are known to affect animal life forms.  You enter the database by listing a
plant species and asking for the non-ubiqutious chemicals and their activities.
Once you have a list, you can select a chemical and get all the other plant
species with that chemical and all the activities of that chemical.  Once there,
you can click on the activity and get a list of all the plant-chemicals (natural
drugs if you prefer) that are know to produce that activity.

The reason I bring up Dr Duke's site is that some varieties of red and
subterranian clover have estrogenic chemicals.  The levels can be so high that
animals (sheep for instance) can fail to conceive when eating them.  The level of
estrogenic chemicals tend to increase during periods of stress, like drought,
mechanical trampling, grazing.  It almost sounds like a defense mechanism that
responds to attacks by the great thundering herds of whatever.

It does raise the question of their affect on grazing rodents.


>
>




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