Heirloom 1000 Seeds - Hairy Vetch Seeds, Used As a Cover Crop, Green Manure, Pasture, Silage, and Hay. Hairy Vetch Seed [1000 Seeds] Hairy vetch is a viney, cool season annual legume with stems 2 to 4 feet long. Leaves are composed of 10 to 20 narrow leaflets and are terminated by branched tendrils. Stems and leaves of hairy vetch are usually pubescent. Flowers are in clusters of 10 to 40, borne in racemes. Each flower is purple and white to rose colored or white. Seed are round and black, developing inside elongated and flattened pods. At the end of the growing season you may be ready to rest, but your garden is not. One final effort can make a big difference: cover cropping. Even small gardens will benefit from the use of cover crops, or "green manures". Tilling, weeding, harvesting and foot traffic of most home gardens tends to destroy soil structure. Planting cover crops is an easy way torevitalize the soil, and help soil tilth and subsequent plant growth. Cover crops are planted in vacant space and worked into the soil after they grow instead of being eaten. They provide a number of advantages to the otherwise wasteful use of space during your garden's off-season. Fall cover crop fixes soil nitrogen. Hairy vetch is a nitrogen fixing legume that provides excellent biomass over the winter, helps control soil erosion and acts as a ground cover. Its pea-type flowers are a lovely violet color. One packet will cover 500 to 600 square feet. Hairy vetch is widely known as a top legume for Nitrogen fixation. Foliage grows slowly in fall, but root development continues over winter in Southern states. Growth speeds up in spring, when hairy vetch becomes a sprawling vine up to 12 feet long. Field height will not get above 3 feet. Thick foliage suppresses spring weeds. Hairy vetch is a hardy, viny, annual or biennial legume, attaining a height of 24 inches when planted alone and higher when planted with a tall companion crop that provides structural support for climbing. Thin, branched stems can reach more than 8 feet long. Compound leaves are made up of 8 to 24 paired, narrow leaflets. Leaves terminate with a tendril used for climbing. Despite its name, stems and leaves can be hairy or smooth. Hairy vetch has a taproot that extends 1 to 3 feet deep. Fall-planted hairy vetch flowers in April and ripens seed in May-June. Groups of 10 to 40 small, long, blue flowers hang from one side of a long flower stem. Spherical seeds (approximately 28,000/lb) are smaller than common vetch seeds. They develop in small pods and usually are grayish or black. Hairy vetch is hardseeded.