A successful hunting season usually starts out with a good food plot. We are farmers at heart and want you to grow a high quality food plot to feed your deer and help you harvest the deer you choose. A good way to do that is plant something that the deer like to eat. We use forage varieties in our blends that produce more forage and higher quality forage than other seed varieties that focus on seed yield and seed quality.
Start Clean
A successful food plot takes preparation and cooperative weather. You can increase your opportunity to have a successful food plot by starting clean. This will let you have less insect pressure by decreasing their food source at least 30 days before planting. And also it allows you to have better seed to soil contact so your seed is able to germinate properly. Also it will be less competition for resources while your food plot is growing.
Proper Fertilization
For the best results you need to take a representative soil sample and send it to a reputable lab to analyze your soil’s nutrient levels. All crops require nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, however legumes are able to form a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in the soil and fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. We recommend following a labs recommendations for fertilization to the management unit you decide.
Blends are Better
We recommend blends over mono crop food plots because it adds diversity to overcome adverse weather conditions and also deer prefer different plants throughout the growing season. We hear of reports of deer hitting the brassicas hard after cold weather, this is most likely due to the brassica’s high protein content.
Manage for Success
Our fall blends with clover in them are designed to give your wildlife high quality forage into the following spring to early summer. We recommend an application of a graminicide in late February to mid March to kill the grass part of our blend and reduces competition so the clovers can capture more sunlight and nutrients.
This is a customer picture taken on June 2. This is arrowleaf clover in our 10 way blend and it has been properly managed for maximum forage production into early summer. As you can tell in the picture above the deer are utilizing this forage as designed.
Feed Them and They Will Grow
We also have a very good summer blend for the hunters wanting to provide high quality forage during the summer months when naturally occurring plants are non abundant or low palatability. It is by far much cheaper to grow your deer something to eat rather than to supplementally feed them.
