Deer hammer poke salad at my place. I leave it standing when I see it. I agree that weeds for a deer manager are beneficial. 1. Some weeds deer will eat and are very nutritious for them. 2. Weeds that are not beneficial to deer in a plot will become organic matter once it is mowed. Just have to keep a watch on the plot and not let the weeds take over.
I'd say it really depends on the plot and your objectives. For example, I plant my small sub-acre harvest plots with perennial clover. I do take care to follow best practices during establishment to start with a clean field, but after the first year, I just let it go and mow once just before the season. Clover is a cool season crop and my objective is hunting season attraction for these plots. There are so many "weeds" and such diversity of weeds that you wouldn't even know there was clover in it in the summer. Those weeds provide food and cover for wildlife as well as helping shade the clover from the hot summer sun. I mow as cool evenings and fall rain favor the clover. For the first few years, a couple weeks after I mow, you won't even know there were weeds in the field. Lush clover, favored at this time of year, takes over. That clover fulfills my objective for 7 to 10 years before I have to rotate. Because clover fixes N into the soil, each year, it becomes more and more attractive to many weeds that need the N. Eventually, a clover field wears out and needs to be rotated no matter what you do. The time and cost of regular mowing and selective herbicides far outweigh any benefit in this case.
Contrast that will the summer plots I had for years. Between browse pressure and weed competition, I could not begin to cover the summer stress period. These feeding plots had a different QDM objective of covering that stress period. By using RR beans and gly I was able to cover that period for many years. When we had a pine thinning adjoining these large fields followed by a controlled burn, the open canopy and needle removal caused a plethora of seeds in the seed bank to sprout. The most dominate was Marstail which quickly got into our food plots. Because it is naturally resistant to glyphosate, planting RR beans was just making things worse, so we had to change course.
We turned to 24D Amine and a smother crop of buckwheat and sunn hemp for summer. Eventually we turned to a LIberty generic for burndown which did an even better job on Marstail. Things are under control now, so we could probably go back to planting RR beans, but decided not to. Why use all that herbicide to plant beans? If we go RR, the Marstail could raise it's ugly head again. Using Liberty-link is even more expensive. The buckwheat and sunn hemp are competing favorably against weeds, and shooting does has helped with browse pressure. So at this point, we are sticking with the buckwheat/sunn hemp approach. It has been quite cost effective for us.
Here are two examples where different conditions and objectives and required quite different management.
A very smart guy once said that the best definition of a weed is simply a plant growing some place you don't want it to grow. So by that definition, we are probably all anti-weed. However, by a farmer's definition, "anything I didn't plant in my crop field", there are many weeds that are either positive or neutral from a deer manager's perspective.
Thanks,
Jack
