Description
Lab Lab is an extremely easy to establish and nutritious warm-season annual legume. Lab lab legume is characterised by its thick, climbing, twining stems, large leaves and is very heat and drought tolerant. Lab lab has the ability to fix high levels of nitrogen, over 150kg N/ha under irrigation, when inoculated with the correct strain of rhizobia (Group J).
The short lived Lab lab provides bulk dry matter over the warmer months with options for grazing, silage production or as a cover crop. Like all legumes, Lab Lab should be grazed prior to flowering to maintain the maximum forage quality.
As a cover crop, Lab lab is a popular nitrogen fixing option to contribute to soil N and contribute to infertile acidic soils.
- Annual summer legume with ability to fix high levels of nitrogen
- Excellent as a cover to suppress weeds and provide soil erosion control
- Tolerates acidic, low fertility soils
- Once established, fairly drought tolerant
- Grows rapidly
| Variety | Lab lab |
| Role | Cover crop, nitrogen fixing |
| Sowing Rate | 25-40 kg/ha |
| Growing cycle | 60 days |
| Growing seasons | Late spring, summer |
| Height at full canopy | 0.5-1m |
| Unit sizes | 25kg, 1000kg |
| Available in | Multi Specie Pasture Blends |
Why use summer legumes such as Lab Lab?
Enhance soil quality by improvements in soil fertility, physical soil attributes and paddock ecosystem with summer legume forage crops. Summer legume forage & cover crops are an excellent way to improve soil nitrogen levels by significant fixation or by incorporating green manure crops into the soil in southern parts of Australia. Nitrogen fixation is the summer legumes ability to extract nitrogen from the air and convert it to a form plants usually obtain from the soil – and then using it for positive plant growth.
