My 2020 Food Plots: Year in Review

  

   This year was the first year that I started experimenting with "food plots" or herbaceous forage species for wild game. While the first few years on my property I mainly focused on planting woody browse species, including fruit and nut bearing trees and shrubs, this year I wanted to focus on finding out what species I could plant on my property that I would be able to use for my "wild game meadow" idea. I learned a ton this year about different species of plants and I feel very confident that I have a good foundation of knowledge about where I would like to start next year's food plots. 

    I started this past January by frost seeding several varieties of seeds into several different plots. On the dry south facing road cut on the southern side of my property I had really good success with Small Burnet, but not much else grew well in any quantity.  The Small Burnet is known for being extremely hardy and will stay green year round. I also think the steepness of this plot was able to keep the deer pressure off and allow the burnet to thrive, while in some of my other plots it was continually eaten to the ground. Other than the burnet it looked like some chicory, sweet clover and a handful of crownvetch plants were able to survive, but most did not seem to thrive. As most of these are perennials it will be interesting to see how well they do next year and if they will spread over time. 

    On some of my other plots the chicory, burnet, plantain, sweetclover, crimson clover, hairy vetch and blue flax all seemed to do fairly well, however because the plots were so small the deer pressure was very high and most were eaten close to ground level. However, despite the severe browsing most plants seemed to survive so hopefully they will come back next year. Also the hairy vetch and crimson clover, which are annuals did seem to reseed themselves so I will likely continue to use these in my future mixes. 

    The big circular food plot I seeded with Cereal Rye and Winter Wheat was almost a total failure.  I think because the seeds of these species are relatively large and the fact that the area was still mostly sod, even though it was severely weakened from scalping, made the seeds not able to germinate well and in fact almost none were able to germinate. With this one I abandoned it as a food plot and continued to scalp it during the growing season to help kill off the grass. As of now it is largely bare soil although there are still a fair amount of widely spaced grass plants that would likely fill in if I let it. I think for this one I will continue to use annuals to eventually shade out and kill off the remaining sod and then after several seasons of annuals I will seed it with a perennial mix like in some of my other plots. 

    This past May I experimented by creating another plot where I chose summer annual cover crop species that I could cycle between cool season and warm season species to build up the soil and help shade out any perennial grass trying to grow in the plot. I planted sunflowers, buckwheat, grain sorghum, lablab and cowpeas. The buckwheat did really well early on and went to seed within a couple months which is what was expected. The sunflowers did the best and grew up to 6 feet all the way into September when they flowered, but were killed by an early fall frost in Mid September.  The grain sorghum only ended up growing about a foot tall and did not do very well probably from the summer drought and the lablab and cowpeas both did very poorly most likely because I did not inoculate them with nitrogen fixing bacteria. Because of this from now on I've decided that any legumes I plant must be inoculated before I plant them. After this mix died in September I broadcast Cereal Rye onto the plot then used a handmade foot crimper I built to crimp down the dead plants, mostly sunflowers, on top of the seeds to give them some cover and increase the seed to soil contact. This worked very well and I got good germination as soon as the first fall rains came near the end of September.  I will also likely plan on frost seeding some annual legumes such as crimson clover, balansa clover and hairy vetch into the plot in late winter so it has some more diversity and then in May I will again plant a warm season mix and crimp down the cool season plants on top of those seeds.

    During mid summer I mowed and weedwhacked some areas that were mostly starthistle and medusahead grass, both annuals, in order to control the starthistle and to experiment with planting annual clovers and cereal rye into the dead annual weeds. I figure converting these areas into food plots will be much easier because the annuals are easier to control than the perennial grass growing on other areas of my property.  I seeded these areas in late August and September and most of them seemed to have germinated fairly well. I'm hoping the rye and clovers are able to shade out a large portion of the annual weeds and over time eradicate that vast majority of them. I will likely frost seed these areas with more rye and annual clovers this winter as well as adding some hairy vetch.  I also might experiment with planting summer annuals in these spots and mowing or crimping down the cool season annual growth to cover their seeds like I did in the previous plot. 

    This next year I think I will focus mostly on using annuals because they are much better at handling weeds. And then once I have good weed control hopefully after only a year or 2 then I could start adding back in perennials that would be able to thrive without any competition from weeds. I also would like to experiment this year with using large sheets of black plastic to kill off the sod and create a great spot for planting my seed mixes. And eventually, maybe in a few years, I would  like to get pigs to use as tillers to uproot the perennial sod grass and create more bare areas to plant my mixes into. 

    I learned quite a bit this year and my experimentation will definitely continue next year and on until I'm able to develop a system of planting and with species that will thrive in my area. I will continue to learn and make mistakes, but these will only help me in the future while I am attempting to create an amazing wild food property.