Food Plot Blend for Fall
Filed under: Ask Grant, Herbicide
Grant, Thanks for the great presentation at the QDMA meeting in Louisville. I am in my first year of a 140 acre track in Southern Indiana. I failed miserably in trying to plant popular “mixes” in ground that has not been worked forever…old fescue. The ragweed loved the new lime and fertilizer! Since the seed was a blend there was no one herbicide that I could use effectively. I now know that next year I will plant a single seed (like an Eagle Seed bean) that I can work with roundup to get beyond the weeds. I have these 3 plots that I would like to “work” yet this fall and get something growing that I will then replace with the bean plots late next spring. Any suggestions on what would be a good plot to provide some browse for deer or turkey and clean the plots up in preparation for the beans? Winter wheat, oats? Thanks for all, John
John,
I will be planting wheat or a blend of wheat and clover this fall. Wheat is relatively inexpensive (abnormally high this year – about $18 per bag), is easy to grow, and readily transfers nutrients to deer. I strongly recommend having the soil analyzed and adding the appropriate nutrients. I think some food plot farmers skip this step because they believe wheat to be simple or common. No forage crop can transfer nutrients to deer unless the nutrients are available. I add a bit of extra nitrogen as wheat readily uses nitrogen and deer seem to easily sense where I added extra nitrogen to the wheat (near my stand). It is easy to add clover to wheat when planting. The clover won’t produce much tonnage during the first fall, but will usually provide a substantial amount of quality forage in the spring. Deer and turkey will readily consume the clover at that time of year, typically before other forage crops are productive.
The one negative to adding clover is that it is naturally very resistant to glyphosate. If you plan to no-till soybeans (my favorite plan in most situations) into the wheat the following spring as soon as the soil temperature is 62 degrees (at 9 AM at about 2” deep), then simply spraying the wheat/clover blend to prepare the field with glyphosate will leave some clover alive which will be competition to the young soybeans. However, there are worse problems to have because the beans normally shade out the clover within a few weeks.
Growing Deer together,
Grant
