Wind Gypsy
5 year old buck +
The area I intend to have the majority of my food plot acreage is highly exposed to 2 roads and a priority has been getting it screened off. I started planting spruce trees this spring but assumed i'd need to plant annual screens for years until the spruce grew enough. The NWW HD screen that i assumed would be easy to grow did not do well enough to be an effective screen for this hunting season and I'm trying to figure out if the soil is just not going to support a sorghum screen and I should abandon trying any further in the future. <- I'm going to ramble but the bolded in red is my primary purpose for this thread.
Some background:
-This is a poorly drained area that has been hay ground for years but I've not seen it have standing water other than in a briefly when we had heavy rains this spring.
-The field was/is largely made up of thick reed canary grass, some areas it is not too bad. The soil is also pretty rocky.
-This spring i mowed the grass then sprayed with gly once regrowth started. A week later i drilled the sorghum in and immediately sprayed with simazine after planting.
-I clearly didn't get a good kill on RCG and would have been better served by killing late fall to prep for this. There was a thick mat of "dead" RCG that was quite tough and had not decayed at all. That said, the areas where there is a good kill and pre-emergence control with simazine appear to be almost worse off than the areas with competition.
-This was my first planting with new drill and I was tight on time so i drilled quickly without getting all the bugs figured out on how get seed exactly where I wanted it
-I did see a fair bit sorghum browsed by deer when it was freshly emerging
Some pics below showing what things look like.
Some close ups of the leaves that might indicate part of the problem?
Some background:
-This is a poorly drained area that has been hay ground for years but I've not seen it have standing water other than in a briefly when we had heavy rains this spring.
-The field was/is largely made up of thick reed canary grass, some areas it is not too bad. The soil is also pretty rocky.
-This spring i mowed the grass then sprayed with gly once regrowth started. A week later i drilled the sorghum in and immediately sprayed with simazine after planting.
-I clearly didn't get a good kill on RCG and would have been better served by killing late fall to prep for this. There was a thick mat of "dead" RCG that was quite tough and had not decayed at all. That said, the areas where there is a good kill and pre-emergence control with simazine appear to be almost worse off than the areas with competition.
-This was my first planting with new drill and I was tight on time so i drilled quickly without getting all the bugs figured out on how get seed exactly where I wanted it
-I did see a fair bit sorghum browsed by deer when it was freshly emerging
Some pics below showing what things look like.
Some close ups of the leaves that might indicate part of the problem?
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