Recent content by farmlegend

I've had Sunn Hemp in my multi-species cover crops in two consecutive seasons, southern Michigan, heavy dirt. Has not performed well. Gets 2' tall, max, and doesn't seem to thrive at all, much of it never came up. A nearby friend with similar circumstances had it perform even worse.

Kind of imprecise here, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-150#/acre, and I didn't cover the plot completely(didn't have enough seed and was time constrained). Next year, I'll be dumping more grains down and throughout the entirety of the plot.

I've read that deer often avoid certain foods in certain places, and it has to do with certain nutrients they find unpalatable. As an example, members of the brassica family are very efficient at extracting sulphur from the soil, and deer will avoid eating plants with certain levels of sulphur...

Yeah, and I may need to up the wheat/cereal rye component to help with this. I have had decent success with coolseason grasses by using a clethodim/crop oil cocktail, providing it's applied no later than mid-May or thereabouts in my area. Later than that, it's not nearly as effective.

They are picky in the extreme. It almost has to be seen to be believed. My deer will readily eat alfalfa, clover, corn, soybeans, and cereal grains. Anything else and it's a bite here and there but no serious feeding. They will nibble at winter peas, but not much at all. They did hammer the...

Would clethodim have some residual affect on spring planted oats?

Believe me, the soil transformation is a big part of this. The two food plots, totaling 9 acres, are surrounded by shortgrass prairie(two varieties little blue, sideoats grama, canada wildrye, junegrass, prairie dropseed, and a shitton of forbs) which I likewise established at the same time. I...

BTW - thanks much to all of you who have commented here. I know a great many land managers/food plotters but know literally none that have gone down this cover crop road. Ours is quite a small community. Hopefully, it grows - by a lot.

Good point which raises another question to me. There currently is quite a bit of thatch over most of the gtound, however…. 2024 will be year three of this program, and I burned the thing down (gly) immediately prior to planting in years 1 and 2. I didn’t like doing so last year, but I have...

Sidebar - things I learned while looking up other stuff - alyce and alice are different clovers, I used to consider them the same. One's annual, the other perennial. Nice clover essay by Kent K: https://www.qdma.ca/en/2014-03-27-13-07-39/what-we-do/deer-biology-management/107-clover-101/

Some of the 2023 Milpa garden bounty, decorative gourds. 😎

And often that lack of rain influences the spring planting, too, causing failure of some seeds and delaying the growth of the rest. This past spring, I was able to plant on May 20, and we didn't get a drop of rain until July. None of my sunflowers came up, at all, and almost none of my peas.

Cosign. Alsike clover tolerates seasonal wetness, and even flooding, better than any food plot plant I know. One small end of my cover crop zone is usually underwater until June, and it's loaded up alsike . Frostseeded it onto snow-covered ice. I always have a bag of it around for wet spots...

Will absolutely throw some flax and squash in there and look for some grazing corn. That's the cool thing about these kind of plots - the more the merrier! Thanks!

I'm in Hillsdale County, Michigan, right near where Ohio/Indiana/Michigan come together. My growing season is a good bit shorter than it is 60 miles east or 90 miles west of me. Clover is really my bread and butter plot, and I have it in several other locations on my farm. My fave is Alice...