Food Plots Failed

Food plots failed

So its midsummer and you decided to take a little drive and check out your bean and corn food plots

for deer.   You get there and what do you find?   Nothing the deer are going to be flocking to.  Its a bummer when your food plots failed, but you have options.  Today we are going to break down one example of how you can make lemonade when your food plots failed.

Food plots failed

Today finds us in the upper midwest, looking at a food plot of soybeans that never really germinated.  We may have planted them too deep, or the seed may have been old, but either way they did not grow.  We need some good tonnage as this is a high deer density area so we have decided to plant a brassica blend.  2 pounds rape, 3 pounds of purple top turnips, and 5 pounds of a tillage radish on 1.5 acres.  Luckily when we look through the weed bed bed, we can see enough dirt to know that one good rain will pound our tiny seeds into the ground for soil contact.  We are going to spray, then fertilize, and then broadcast our seed.  400 pound of triple 19 willl do the trick here, and we may top dress with 200 lbs of urea later on, especially if we notice the leaves turning purple, indicating a lack of nitrogen.

Food plots failed

The plan is to not disturb the seed bed by turning the dirt,  and by spraying the short weeds, they will fall over our seeds making a blanket to trap the moisture for germination during the heat of summer.   These seeds may struggle with limited rain, but the compost we will make is like a dead nurse crop that helps our young plants get started.

Food plots failed

This technique will work for addressing low spots that died out, or very weedy areas that need some help before the deer season.  Your food plots failed in spots, but you can jump in there with a backpack sprayer and some seed and be back in the game.  If you fertilized well early on, take some of those credits and use less this go around, but always fertilize brassica.  Many food plots failed because it was not fertilized.

By planting our brassica 70 days before the first average frost, we will hit that 60 – 90 day window that allows lots of growth and tonnage of forage, without letting the plants mature making them unattractive to the deer herd.  We sprayed, planted and fertilized this plot on only 3 hours.  It helps that we did not have to work the dirt because we could see it, and even though our food plot failed, we will still have greens this fall.  Check the average first frost in your area to discover a good time to easily plant a brassica blend when your food plots failed.