Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Food plots

Location: South facing area in the most open area you can find. If I can get in there and have room to maneuver the Mule and drag around, it's good.
Seed: Cool season, fast growing shade tolerant varieties.
Timing: Plant right before the leaves start to drop.
Plenty of fast acting lime and fertilizer.

They usually fade out once the trees start to green back up in the spring but these are basically small kill plots. I usually put the youth/first time hunters in them.

nice job Fyrepowr!

yep, planting now--rye, same deal kill plots--but do put a bit of clover with the rye and have a designated clover field to keep them close in the summer

some volunteer trefoil comes up from a planting 10 yrs ago...it was too much work to maintain

...planting 5 plots 1/2 acre to 2 acre.

fwiw...

Have used buckwheat. Very popular with the venison. I planted late spring and then turned down what was left to plant a fall cold plot.

Grows quickly...I believe it pukes with the frost...but it doesn't matter, the deer wiped the majority out anyway.

When motivated, do disc in the rye/wheat in spring and buckwheat in fall, as green manure. Like field rye/winter wheat, it is relatively cheap--and I always add token amounts of the least expensive short clover to each.

havent tried buckwheat yet, but i think i will next year....

this winter we're mowing fire breaks around a couple of overgrown fields & then torching them next february before the spring green up, and after we get some regrowth i'll nuke 'em with roundup, disc, & seed cover crops.

a couple more pix....
sunrise from a ladder stand, overlooking a small plot...


some of the locals, in the same plot...


dead buck laying along the edge of a plot last year in muzzleloader season, my brother in law let him walk twice before he finally decided it was just meant to be.


looking out from a ladder stand after a plot just got seeded.

Several years back I decided that I wanted to try Rye, but never found any seeds. Everybody had ryegrass, but no rye. I have volunteer ryegrass. Usually plant a mixture of wheat and oats, with some mixed greens scattered in. Have used winter peas in the mixture but seed are hard to find now. Use to be every where you shopped, now nowhere. Late with it this year due to broken down seeder. I have been working on it, I am slow at things anymore. miles

Fyre:
Looks like a great set-up. That last field looks big enough for a profit!
Kinda of woodsy for OK? Haven't seen much of it-just the NE corner. Son did some commercial wiring down there, I think at a military base a year ago, and liked it.

I have had the best luck with buckwheat as an summer annual (turn down in fall). But that is here. They hit it harder than clover, rye/wheat, trefoil or oats. Oats seemed to puke with the hard frost. They scrape snow to get the rye/wheat during rifle.

Miles:
I get field (annual) rye at the local co-op. It was 10.50 for a 50# bag of seed...the same as winter wheat. They are interchangeable for me as a fall planting. Down on river bottom here, so if the corporate habitat erasers up above are planting winter wheat, then I do rye. Deer like a change...:) Winter peas are a buck a pound, so I go something like 10-1 mix, just enough to give them one more reason to stop in. I mix in a little of the cheapest clover I can get for a nitrogen fix and to have some protein going in the spring. That all sounds more industrious than it is, and it doesn't always happen every year...

fwiw

FyrepowrX and Rockchucker - those are some nice fields. And believe me, I know that a lot of work went into those for sure.

Here's one of the 6 we've been working this year:

Memorial Day weekend after cutting/pulling/digging/chopping Black Locust and spraying a 2% glyphosate mix - "We killed everything!":



Wrong!!! July 4th weekend the Black Locust is back with a vengeance because 1) We disturbed them and made them mad, and 2) Even better, we killed off their competition.



Fast forward to 9/17, and after mowing, another round of glyphosate, mowing, ANOTHER round of glyphosate and Crossbow, mowing, chisel plowing, and disking twice, somehow we've managed to start raising a pretty nice stand of brassica. There's a pile of Black Locust roots the chisel plow pulled up behind me in the pic that's the size of a Peterbuilt.




In gymnastics, they call the balance beam the Devil's apparatus. In nature, the Devil's apparatus has got to be Black Locust. Black Locust has a relatively small native range, and unfortunately my club is pretty much right in the middle of it.

We have 5 other fields like this one going on the mountain. For some weird reason I really enjoy messing around with food plotting. Otherwise, I probably would have thrown my hands up in disgust and given up in June - just like every other one of the club guys who've tried it in the past 20 years.

This pic is absolutely hilarious. The stereotypical woman - "Yes, I know that green stuff behind me is perfect, but I'm going to look over here in this dead stuff for even more perfecter stuff.......

as of today. deer are in it so much, looks like a bunch of pigs rooting around in it

summer wont seem to ease up, was 101 yesterday not counting the heat index and by afternoon it was pretty miserable outside. But, we got most of the fall plots knocked out.

we got started yesterday morning about 7:00, and the heat ran us off by about 4:00, but heading out we had 7 of our plots done, and a thousand pounds of wheat/rye went into the dirt yesterday.

we also got 3 more plots disced & ready to seed, but lost my motivation after baking in the heat; i'll go back down next weekend to finish those off.

our usual method is to scalp them down low with the mower, disc to loosen, broadcast seed, and then use the plotmaster to run over it a second time to cover the seed...we set the disc depth on it to run shallow so it covers the seed lightly as it cultipacks.



if i can figure out how, i'll post a short clip of it...

FyrepowrX - nice looking field. Been there, done that in the high-90/low-100 heat and it takes dedication.

How do you like that Plotmaster?

We looked at one but for now we don't have enough acreage to justify the cost. Plus, we have pretty good access so I can get one of the local tobacco farmers to hit it with his 5-bottom chisel for a case of Jim Beam. After that our small 3-point disk can handle it no problem. Then we just use a spike drag and Ye Olde water filled poly lawn roller to incorporate the seed.

that one was an accidental purchase, but i like it quite a bit. It has a 100 pound capacity remote controlled electric seeder that lets you control seed rate at the touch of a button, so for soil that is not overly hardpacked you can disc, seed, and cultipack in one pass.

several years ago i was nosing around online & typed in the word "food plot" in the search field, this one popped up for sale...i sent the guy a message and it turns out it was sitting in a warehouse a few blocks away from my office, (helluva lucky coincidence!) so i went & looked at it told him i'd take it, and he even loaded it up on a trailer & brought it to me...think i paid about $600 for it.

kinda heavy for smaller ATV's to pull, works better with the side-by-side dragging it...i also hitched it to my truck to seed long shooting lanes.



the weather smiled on us and a gentle soaking rain has been falling since noon today & will continue tonight, so although i didnt get to go seed the other 3 plots this weekend, the ones i did finish are gonna start popping....cool front coming right behind the rain so i'm going out Tuesday to move 7 or 8 ladders.

Both of these fields were planted on the same day (8/27), using the same mix (Wildlife Perfect Grazing Mix with 10% brown top millet added in), with the same fertilizer (10-20-20 to achieve a 50/75/75 lbs/acre NPK). The pics were taken on 10/2.

The difference?

The field on the left had a starting pH of 5.0 and the field on the right had a pH of 6.3. We limed the one on the left in April with 2.25 tons/acre and left the other one alone. I need to take another sample but I'm guessing the pH is still somewhere below 6.0.



We're seeing the same thing in the brassica fields. The field on the left had a starting pH of 4.9 and the other one had a pH of 6.0. We hit the lower one with 4 tons per acre and the higher one with 1.25 tons back in April.

Some of you guys should be farmers.

I planted a couple of patches back around the middle of Sept. and had enough moisture to get a good stand of mixed wheat and oats. No rain since, and things are getting needy. 40% chance one day later in the week, but that is not much. miles

swamp here...am sick of mowing grass...but field rye is lush and deer have moved in...:)

Well, I was way off on my assumptions. Turns out the fields that aren't growing very well actually have a high pH - 7.8. Guess we got a little carried away with the lime in the spring....Plus they are slightly nitrogen and potassium deficient.

Plan is to hit them with some ammonium sulfate (34-0-0) "SuperKicker Plus" and 0-0-60. The sulfur in the SuperKicker will help lower the pH.

Has anyone tried tillage radishes yet?

The "Tillage Max" brand?

No, but I'm looking at them for a small plot we're working for next year. The ground is hard as hell and rocky so we're thinking we might try them in the spring to see if it will loosen it up.

like these.