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Vicia ervilia
Also called Bitter Vetch, Ervil
Bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) is an ancient annual legume crop from the Mediterranean and Near East, grown mainly for its seed as livestock feed. It is a field crop rather than an ornamental, and it tolerates shallow, alkaline, well-drained soils.
Vicia ervilia, called ervil or bitter vetch, is an ancient legume crop of the Mediterranean region. Besides the English names, other common names include: gavdaneh (Persian), kersannah (Arabic), yero (Spanish), rovi (Greek), burçak (Turkish), and karshinim (Hebrew).
The nutritional value of the grain for ruminant cattle has guaranteed the species' continued cultivation in Morocco, Spain and Turkey. The crop is easy to cultivate and harvest and can be grown on very shallow, alkaline soils.
The wild strains of bitter vetch are limited to an area that includes Anatolia and northern Iraq, with an extension south along the Anti-Lebanon Mountains of Syria and Lebanon. Traces of the earliest domesticated instances were recovered from several archeological sites in Turkey, with an uncorrected radiocarbon dating of the 7th and 6th millennia BC.
The grain is an excellent sheep and cattle feed concentrate. It has been held in high esteem by farmers in the Old World since the beginning of agriculture to improve the nutritional value of bulk feeds.
Lentil · American vetch · Vicia anatolica · Reddish tufted vetch · Bird vetch · Broad Bean · Grass Like Vetch · Tiny vetch · Dwarf Lentil · Purple broad vetch · Eastern Wild Lentil · Hungarian vetch
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Vicia ervilia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
