2012 Season Food Plots

[LeeBishop]

I have been working on clearing a section of timber today for a new food plot.

In just curious what you boys are up to in regards to your herd supplementation.  

This drought has me replanting plots in hope the rains will pick up into the fall.  I picked up 100lbs of mix that is 40% soybean, then cow peas, millet and other goodies.  Its supposed to be a mix that will do ok in dry conditions.

I will take some photos tomorrow. I have one of the plots cleared and the roots ripped up. Going to disc tomorrow and sow seeds.

So lets see what you're all working on.

[Michigan Mark]

Test your soil before you plant and you will be ahead of the game.

[m midd]

We usually do 6  3/4 Acre plots on our place. Usually snow peas, wheat, clover and turnips.  Its almost time for us to get started since season is coming in 15 days early this year.

[LeeBishop]

One of the areas won't need any fertilizer because the soil is rich soil from millennia of flooding along a creek. Pretty much everything grows there.  The new area is rocky with a clay mix. Its growing some good grasses, but its gonna need help.

[Adam S. Daugherty]

If you do not take a soil test and send it off to the land grant university in your area you are only taking a SWAG at it.  "One of the areas won't need any fertilizer because the soil is rich soil from millennia of flooding along a creek. Pretty much everything grows there."  Posibably high in P2O5 from deposits.  Nitrogen is not deposited with alluvial material.  What is your pH?  Doesn't matter what nutrients are present if pH is not in range where nutrients are plant available they will not be taken up by plants.  Sorry but I am an agricultural professional and I just always have to chime in when folks neglect to spend $6-$8 on a soil test. Depending on what you are planting will determine the fertilization needs.  If you are adding nitrogen to legumes (soybeans, peas) it is the same as throwing money into the fire.  It is July 18th now.  I would look into planting a cover plot of buckwheat and peas.  If you having any critters in the area they should keep it mowed down as quick as it comes up.  About sept 25-30th burn the area with glyphosate 2 qts/acre with 15 gallons of water per acre and look at no-tilling a fall/winter annual food plot consiting of 8 lbs red clover, 50 pounds oats, and 2 pounds of brassicas of your choice per acre.  If no-till drill is available for your area I highly recommend incorporating it into you schedule of operationns.  Keep in mind the absolute worst thing you can do for your food plot is run a disc through it or anykind of soil disturbance.  Metal kills all the bugs that makes the stuff we spend money on to add to the soil plant avaialble.  It also kills the infiltration rate so when water falls instead of soaking in it will run off and not be plant available.  The only way to control weeds is to out compete the weeds with desirable forage.  Herbicides are much better for the world and your pocket book than tillage.  This all may sound a little far fetched but since I have starting implementing the recommendations that I make across thousands and thousands acres of cropland annually onto the 7 acres of food plots that I implement on poor soils, the responses that I have seen have been phenominal.  If folks tried to raise corn, wheat, and beans across this country the way we try to grow food plots we would all starve to death.  Take you a soil test, get your pH correct, kill your weeds, keep the bugs happy, conserve your mositure, preserve the residue, and enjoy your food plots.

[LeeBishop]

Adam, I'm in a mountain range over an hour away from anywhere I can buy a PH meter. I'm not going to burn more in gasoline to get a $10 PH meter than the cost  of a $37 bag of seed.

If it grows awesome.

And im not going to be putting fertilizer in the creek area. The other food plot (the wide angled photo) is on the other side of the property on the side slop of a shale hill where sediment and organic material has deposited to create soil. It's a bit on the clay side, but it's growing grass vegetation unlike the hills around it where there is exposed shale and it won't grow anything other than moss.

I don't have a fortune to buy all kinds of stuff with and I don't have all of them implements to do everything with either. I'm working with a chisel plow and a set of discs and two tractors that are a bit too big to be going through the woods with.

The guy  down the highway ordered me the wrong stuff, but oh well. He got me the Spring mix instead of the Fall mix. Still had to pay the man.  Will the soybean work? No, it's too late for them.  

I had clover planted but the drought killed that back and the deer were hitting it hard because it was some of the only good vegetation left. So, it's just now starting to partially come back after the rains last week.

I'm probably going to replant some clover as well.  Its going to have to be along the creek to where it stays the most moist as well with all of the drought activity.

I also have a five acre island in the middle of a river that the deer use to bed down on. I'm going to see about clearing out scrub brush from there and planting a few acres of kenaf seed to grow some thick vegetation for them.

It will make a little jungle for them about ten feet high and since it's a cannabis plant it has those oil-rich seeds that will be good for birds and deer.

     


This is what the plot area looked like before while I had put a camera out checking on deer movement on trails going through the clearing.

 

Here is the smaller area on the side of a shale hill I cleared trees and brush from yesterday.

     

And here is a road around a pine field that is along a creek.

     
     

[Lowrider]

Lee we have 500 acres off of the Red River in Southwest Arkansas. More sand than anything. I have been planting it for the last 15 years and just keep disking the vegitation in each fall which has actually built the soil up from decomposition. All that to say, each year I plant a mixture of wheat, rye,oats, winterpeas, and clover around the last week of September. I have one 7 acere plot, one 5 acre plot, one that is about 5 1/2 acres and about 2 acres in right of ways. We have counted as many as 32 deer at a time in just one of the plots. This mixture will carry thru the winter and the clover will come up in the following spring if not a little throughout the winter if it is warm enough.

[LeeBishop]

I need to clear out some more land around the creek .  Its mostly rivercane and that garbage tries to overrun every field. So i may clear it out in the next month and plant that with clover and wheat for winter My brassica plot was ruined last year from flooding rains that piled up leaves across the whole thing and wiped it out.

Tomorrow i am going to mix in some ash into the clay of the new plot i cleared. We have acidic clay soil on most of the property. In not going to town just for lime though. So the ash from my hickory bbqing will work well enough to help balance the PH.

[Jason R. Wesbrock]

Adam,

Thank you for the excellent advice. Early last spring my wife and I bought some land and decided to plant ½-acre of brassicas. Instead of paying $14 for two soil tests (the ½-acre was two separate plots) I decided to buy a pH tester that I could use year after year. I used the tester, and it said 6.5. So I spent a bunch of money of fertilizer, seed, and gas, and went to work. At their best, you could have stuffed all the greens that grew on that ½-acre into a brown paper lunch sack.

This spring I sent soil samples in and found out the pH in my plots were 5.0 and 5.5. No wonder next to nothing grew. I spread and tilled in the suggested amount of lime, let it sit for a while, and planted test plots as per the soil sample results (80# or nitrogen and 120# of potash / acre). Before the drought scorched everything to dust, I had about 70% coverage with very tall greens.  Not too bad seeing as the lime hasn’t even had enough time to take full effect.

I wouldn’t even think of planting a food plot without getting a soil test done anymore. It’s a lot better to spend $7 and know exactly what you need to do for success than throw a few hundred dollars (or more) on the ground at random and hope for the best.

[LeeBishop]

Oops, my phone somehow double posted by itself.

[Adam S. Daugherty]

Lee if you have a reliable source for the ash it can be a great soil amendment to raise soil pH.  However without knowing what the pH is and having a analysis run on the ash you will not know how much to add to achieve desired results.  Not trying to beat a dead horse here but 6-$8 spent send off a soil sample to the University of Arkansas will be the best investment you will ever make in your food plot undertaking.  Adjusting and getting the chemistry correct on the soil is not like making buscuits.  You can't visually see the changes and know when you got it right.  Also from the pictures your food plots will suffer during dry condiditons because of the tree roots capturing the available moisture.  One low cost alternative to increase the productivity of your plots would be to hack and squirt the trees along the edges to kill them at least a drip line distance back.  This can be done with a hatchet and 50% solution of glyphosate (round up).  This will also soften the edge and make it more beneficial for other critters.  The seed mixture that you shown above would be fine to plant now.  Keep in mind that first good frost will get most of what is in the mix.  I would recommend either mix 25 pounds of winter wheat now during planting or around Oct 15th kill plot and sow 50 lbs per acre of winter wheat along with 2 pounds acre of ladino white clover or 4-5 pounds red or crimson clover.  Skinny linear plots are tough for several reasons, shade and tree roots sucking up the mositure.  However they are good for killin.  As you increase the size of your plots think about the shape of an hour glass for final dimensions.  You can create your killin funnel in the slim portion and get the fat parts of the hour glass large enough that the surrounding trees will not completely shade it out.

[LeeBishop]

Adam, i ripped up most of the roots with running a chisel plow down about 15 inches deep. I have big piles of roots i dug up and pushed off into the woods to create habitat for critters.

The one plot is about 1/8 of an acre maybe from guestimation. so i mixed in about 25-30 lbs of ash i had sitting around from burning hickory to smoke beef with. I do a lot of smoking...i have about 1,000 more pounds of beef i have to cook and eat before i have another cow slaughtered. That's one the the drawbacks of having a cow cut up...its a lot of meat to cook.