It doesnt matter because you have them planted for deer, but browsed plants mature and dry at irregular times. I'm guessing that's because the plant senses it needs to produce more seed, so u will have green beans and dried ones.The beans will shrivel up quite a bit as they dry.
View attachment 7239 I have about 4 acres of beans. My beans are about a foot hight, and still have quite a few leaves and have not yellowed yet. They have pods and small birrdshot beans in the pods.. They stayed fairly green and kept up with the browse pressure all summer. I planted brasica, radish and rye / oats into them a few weeks ago.....and that is now taking off too. Nice. Lots of variety of food available into fall.
Next year I am going to fertilize in order to get more growth and bigger bean pods.
View attachment 7240
This area got munched pretty good as evidenced by the exclusion cage. I sprayed the weeds....and the beans came "back" pretty well. Then put some brasica down and still have a nice plot when I checked yesterday. I wish I had snapped a pic.....as this plot looked pretty nice again. Amazing.
I'm going to try to get a pic in the next few days to show the comparison of the plot above. Hard to believe the beans could get that eaten down and still bounce back.
What kind of usage do this forage beans get during sept-early oct? This is a time where at beans generally slow down.
My thought is to e fence the beans all summer and take the fence down around sept 1. If the forage beans stay hot early fall, the deer will have a ton of food, leaving a ton of pods for late fall.
I can always just go with fencing ag beans till mid October and keeping clover for more summer forage.
The top pic in my post was mowed just before it rained. I set the mower at about 12" high and gave it a buzz cut.....took the weed tops off.Did u end up mowing those beans that had all those weeds? Is that the plot?
Looks like it worked good if that's the plot. Doesn't look like any weeds in there.
Had the same seeds / acre as my other plots. I know it looks horrible in the pics....but it really did bounce back to "pretty good" and now the brassica is comming on "good enough' to hunt over it. Shocked me too.The plot that is eaten down has no where near enough seeds per acre.
Had the same seeds / acre as my other plots. I know it looks horrible in the pics....but it really did bounce back to "pretty good" and now the brassica is comming on "good enough' to hunt over it. Shocked me too.
It doesnt matter because you have them planted for deer, but browsed plants mature and dry at irregular times. I'm guessing that's because the plant senses it needs to produce more seed, so u will have green beans and dried ones.
Straw how high up do you have beans?
I'm planting plots next year, but they will be e fenced.
I count 14 pods on a good plant, that's roughly 70 beans a plant. Ouch that's only a few mouthfuls. That doesn't look like an regular ag bean plant?
Mo-u think I should double my planting rate next year, when the plot is fenced?