Musings

Monday, August 24, 2015

Hare's-foot clover



















I have been unable to connect to the interweb for the last few days on account of having been stuck in some fields near Crickhowell with a large number (around 20,000) other (mostly white, middle-class) people. The result of such large numbers in a rural location was overload of the local mobile network to the extent that data-services were suspended. 
Now I am at my parents' house in Swansea I do have access, albeit at unfeasibly slow connection speeds. In fact it has only been possible to load a page without it timing out by fiddling with various techological bits. (For anyone of a sufficiently geeky bent, the ping time was initially over 2000ms with a download speed of 0.04MB/s.)
Enough excuses; there is a lot of catching up to do, most of which will be done tomorrow as it's now already late. But for today I offer you this lovely little Trifolium, Hare's-foot clover, Trifolium arvense. It was growing by the quayside at Solva which, having read the books, is just where you'd expect it to be growing. The Trifoliums are rather charming members of the Fabaceae family, aka the 'legumes', aka peas, vetches and clovers. They all have funny nodules in their roots which contain bacteria that can 'fix' nitrogen, i.e. convert inorganic nitrogen to organic.

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