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Friday, June 11, 2021

Food Plots Update: Spring 2021

 


            So far 2021 has been a very interesting learning experience for me when it comes to my food plot experiments. First of all we had a record dry Spring (March through May) with virtually no substantial rain events and this led to an almost 100% failure for my frost seeded food plots that I planted in early March. Despite this major setback, however, most of my fall planted plots did relatively ok, especially the cereal rye, as well as many of the perennials I planted in Spring of last year.




The road cut foot plot that I started planting last spring did fairly well. I have a lot of small burnet that are flourishing and flowering and starting to go to seed. I also have a decent amount of sweet clover that is growing very well in some spots. Along with that I have a few scattered crown vetch plants that are hanging on through the drought.  Crownvetch spreads through rhizomes so I’m hoping that if it can hang on long enough to get some moisture then it can spread. Hopefully next spring is much wetter and some of the perennials I planted last year can really take off and flourish.  This past spring in March I frost seeded a lot more seeds onto this plot, however because of the record drought practically nothing survived. It does seem that I got some decent survival with more of the small burnet that I planted, which was very encouraging and is showing me that this plant can take extreme conditions even as a seedling so it will likely become a staple in my future mixes.





Last fall I broadcast-seeded several different plots with some winter annuals. In some spots I planted just cereal rye, some with just annual clovers and some with a mix of both. The clovers I chose were crimson clover, balansa clover, berseem clover and arrowleaf clover. Some of every type I planted survived the winter and grew into this spring, however overall the crimson clover seemed to do the best by far. Berseem clover seemed to do the worst with balansa and arrowleaf in the middle. I planted just clover in one area that was a dry south facing slope that I mowed last summer to help control the starthistle. In this area only the crimson clover seemed to do well, but even it stayed very short and did not put on very much vegetative growth before going to seed. There were also a few scattered balansa and arrowleaf clovers that survived in the plot, but between the heavy browsing pressure from deer, poor soil and our severe spring drought it appeared that most did not survive.





 On another dry south facing slope I had broadcast cereal rye alone. On this plot the rye did not do well at all and had the worst rye growth across the whole property. I think this was because of several factors. Firstly this hillside sees a lot of deer traffic so the rye was heavily browsed throughout the winter and early spring. Secondly, the soil on this plot seems to be quite poor and even the invasive weeds in this area don’t seem to get more than about a foot of growth. Finally the drought we had I’m sure contributed to this poor stand of rye.  However, even despite all these setbacks, it does seem that almost all the rye survived and went to seed, it just was very short and spindly compared to the healthier stands of rye. This means that it wasn’t able to provide much of a benefit for shading out weeds, however, I believe that if any of the factors had been improved, either less browsing pressure, better soil or more rain, then this stand would have probably done a lot better. This is because on some of the other plots where I planted rye that had better soil and less deer traffic there was much better growth even despite the drought. Because of this, in the fall when I plant more rye across my property I will definitely want to put up utilization cages to see how these plants do when they are not being browsed by deer. 





In every other plot that I had seeded rye it seemed to flourish and when planted densely enough it did seem to have enough shade to smother out some weeds. However, in most areas it was not planted very densely and thus wasn't able to suppress many weeds.  Because of this I think this fall I will try to plant the rye more densely as well as add in some hairy vetch and or wooly pod vetch to provide even more shade as well as some nitrogen fixation.  I will also likely add in a few other species such as rapeseed to see if it does well in the mix.  I think the more diversity I have the better my mixes will be at outcompeting weeds.



The best stand of rye I got was probably in my plot where I grew summer annuals, mostly sunflowers, last year and then crimped down the sunflowers onto the cereal rye seeds. This past March I also broadcasted a large mix of different annuals, mostly legumes like vetch and clovers, in order to provide more diversity, however, because of the severe drought practically nothing germinated or survived more than a few weeks after germination. This was also the case across all my other plots that I broadcasted my mixes into this past March. This was pretty discouraging considering that these were my biggest most diverse mixes I had planted to date.  Despite this failure I realized that it is probably a good idea to plant something whenever I have the opportunity.  Because I had planted some mixes in the fall my plots weren’t a total loss and this fall I will plan to plant a very large amount and highly diverse mixes across an even larger area on my property. 





Because of our severe spring drought I decided not to plant any summer annual mixes onto any of my plots, however, I did plant a small plot in my garden with several summer annuals in order to experiment to see what does well under ideal conditions including summer watering. In this tiny plot like my “sunflower plot” from last summer I planted sorghum, buckwheat, sunflowers, cowpeas and lablab. I also added scarlet runner beans due to their supposedly fast prolific growth and affinity for cooler mountain climates as well as their ornamental red flowers. I made sure to inoculate the legumes this time after having had very poor growth last year so if even under these ideal controlled conditions the lablab and cowpeas still don’t do well I’ll know that it is most likely the case that it is just too cool of a climate here for them and I will remove them from my summer annual mixes in the future. I think next year if we have a wet enough spring then I will again try to use summer annual mixes in my no-till (foot crimper) plots in order to take advantage of the summer sun and add more organic matter.  It is admittedly, however, a borderline idea since we have such cool dry summers and developing a mix that will thrive here will surely be a challenge.  I’m thinking next year I’ll try adding in some laredo forage soybeans as well as some painted mountain corn.  Both are summer annuals that are supposedly better adapted to cooler summers and I’ve read both are fairly drought hardy as well so they seem like good potential candidates for my mixes. 





This year so far has taught me quite a bit and I will continue to experiment and test out different mixes and species until I can fine tune one that will thrive here. As I’ve stated in previous posts my ideal mixes will be composed of both perennials and self seeding annuals that are able to not only survive and reproduce, but also spread over time under the conditions on my property. They will need to be winter hardy, drought hardy and tolerant of cool summers with practically no rain. They will also have to be tolerant of browse pressure by deer as well as be able to outcompete weeds. This is a pretty big list of qualities, but there are already a few plants that seem to be star players on my property and are doing well despite harsh conditions. So far the A-team includes cereal rye, crimson clover, hairy vetch, sweet clover, sunflowers and small burnet. Hopefully over time I can keep adding to this list and eventually develop a high diversity mix that I can really be proud of.