Hoytvectrix
5 year old buck +
Long story short, the farmer who rents some of our fields decided to go with corn this year despite having 10 straight years of beans. We typically plant about 2.5 acres of beans as food plots on two sides of our property, in addition to to the 20 or so other acres of field beans that are rented out and harvested each year. This year, we knew the beans we were planting would never make it, so we decided to invest in a couple of electric fences. They went in perfectly and have done their job so well we will likely use them from here on out in the coming years. We drilled in the beans but I made a callibration error and planted too heavily in the first field. As a result, we had almost no beans in the middle 0.25 acres of an 1.5 acre food plot.
We eventually came up with the idea of planting some sunflowers in the middle of the plot given that it would be protected by the e-fencing anyways. So I ran to town and bought the only sunflower seed I could find, not knowing if it would even have any viable seed...
I broadcast that in and went over it a few times with a drag. Eventually, I was pleasantly surprised with how much germination we actually had from the bird seed.
As of a week ago, this is what the sunflowers are looking like:
The only question at this point is when do we bring the E-fence down. I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks to do on this. The beans are a mix of 4 varieties of forage beans, and 1 variety of a standard field bean. This is in Northern MO, so we have a good 5-6 weeks of growing weather still, but I wouldn't mind opening the fence up and getting the deer patterned on feeding on bean and sunflower leaves before the bow openers (Sept 15th). Do we leave the fence up for another few weeks to maximize pod production? Is that negating the extra expense of purchasing forage beans? Will deer even eat sunflower leaves at this plant stage?
We eventually came up with the idea of planting some sunflowers in the middle of the plot given that it would be protected by the e-fencing anyways. So I ran to town and bought the only sunflower seed I could find, not knowing if it would even have any viable seed...
I broadcast that in and went over it a few times with a drag. Eventually, I was pleasantly surprised with how much germination we actually had from the bird seed.
As of a week ago, this is what the sunflowers are looking like:
The only question at this point is when do we bring the E-fence down. I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks to do on this. The beans are a mix of 4 varieties of forage beans, and 1 variety of a standard field bean. This is in Northern MO, so we have a good 5-6 weeks of growing weather still, but I wouldn't mind opening the fence up and getting the deer patterned on feeding on bean and sunflower leaves before the bow openers (Sept 15th). Do we leave the fence up for another few weeks to maximize pod production? Is that negating the extra expense of purchasing forage beans? Will deer even eat sunflower leaves at this plant stage?
