Indian Sweet Clover

Indian sweet clover (Melilotus indicus), known across Punjab and Sindh as senji, is an upright winter-annual legume long grown as a rabi fodder, green manure and bee plant. POWO records its native range as the Mediterranean east through Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent, which puts Pakistan inside its core range.¹ For a grower on the canal-irrigated plains, it is the obvious low-input cover to drop in between a kharif vegetable crop and the next wheat or vegetable season.²

Where it thrives

Senji is a cool-season annual that thrives on the rabi rhythm of the Punjab plains, the lower Sindh canal country and the warmer end of the Pothohar plateau. Feedipedia puts its tolerance at mean annual temperatures of 7 to 22 degrees Celsius and annual rainfall of 900 to 1200 mm, with moderate cold resistance and a strong taproot reaching well over a metre.² The plant takes a wide pH band, prefers well-drained neutral to alkaline soils, and tolerates real salinity, up to roughly 3 to 6 dS per metre,²³ which is why it has a place on the salt-affected pockets that dog parts of Sindh and southern Punjab.

Role in the system

Senji sits in the groundcover stratum as a pioneer. Its main jobs are three. It fixes atmospheric nitrogen through rhizobial nodules and feeds the bed for the next crop.³ It pulls a deep taproot down through compacted plough pans and brings up nutrients from below the topsoil. And it flowers heavily through the cool months, feeding honeybees in a window when little else is in bloom.² Treat it as a rotation tool and short-term cover rather than a permanent neighbour: cut and incorporate before pods harden so the residue breaks down fast and the seed bank does not run away.

Growing it

Sow at the start of the rabi season, broadcast or drilled into a moist seedbed at roughly 20 to 25 kg per hectare. Inoculation with the appropriate Melilotus rhizobium pays where the field has not carried clover or sweet clover before. The crop needs little irrigation; one or two waterings carry it through the cool months on most canal land.² Cut for green fodder before full bloom; cutting earlier reduces the bloat risk and keeps coumarin lower in the bale.² For a green-manure pass, chop and incorporate at early flowering, three to four months from sowing, while the tissue is still soft.

What you get

A green-fodder yield in India is reported at 4 to 9 tonnes of dry matter per hectare, with crude protein around 18 percent on a dry matter basis.² Hay needs careful curing because spoiled Melilotus hay converts coumarin to dicoumarol and becomes a bleeding hazard for ruminants; feed it fresh or as well-made silage.²³ The same flowers that worry stockmen are a strong honey source for kept bees.

Sourcing notes

Source seed from a fodder cooperative or research station in Punjab or Sindh and ask specifically for low-coumarin lines if the harvest will go to dairy stock. Senji slots well between a kharif tomato, brinjal or maize crop and the following wheat, taking the place of a bare winter fallow. Drop a small companion bed of marigold or coriander to draw pollinators across both.

Sources

1. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2024). “Melilotus indicus (L.) All.” Plants of the World Online.
2. Heuzé, V., Tran, G., Lebas, F. (2017). “Sour clover (Melilotus indicus).” Feedipedia, INRAE-CIRAD-AFZ-FAO.
3. Zhang, J. et al. (2018). “Coumarin Content, Morphological Variation, and Molecular Phylogenetics of Melilotus.” Molecules.