Looking good there Devil. A good plot will pay off for sure. I enjoy playing with my food plots now that they are pretty well established. But man, they were a lot of work the first two years. I had to lime mine heavily to move the pH from 5.6 to 6.7. It was worth it because I got much bettergrowth anduse about half the seed and fertlizer that I needed before. I plant a 50/50 mix of iron-clay peas and Alyce clover in the spring, and a 1/3 mix of oats, wheat and Ladino clover in the fall.

Here's a picture of a 1/3 acre plot taken from my stand on Jan 9, 2009.

thats sweet semi!! That would be great to see those animals in the yard.

do you think my idea of using oats is ok for the spring/fall? I mainly want to use something cheap to test out the growth before i move on to the good stuff like clover an alfalfa. What fertilizer do you use and how often?

I'll tell you Devil, I made a lot of mistakes the first couple of years - not checking the pH, planting the wrong stuff at the wrong time, planting seed too deep, etc. For example, one fall I planted a plot in field turnips. Man, I got a great crop - lush greens 18" high that the deer would not touch. It turns out turnip greens are bitter until subjected to low temperatures that we were not getting. I can get rye grass to grow like crazy, but found deer will walk across a rye grass field on their way tothewheat plot a couple of hundred yards away.

Tried a couple of those expensive "deer plot" mixes like Plot Spike and Tecomate and found they were not nearly worth the money and no better than (really not as good as) plain old pasture wheat. Wheat is cheap, dependable, cold hardy, and reasonably drought resistant. The local "feed & seed" store is the best and cheapest place to get seed. I use6-24-24 fertilizer from a local F&S.

Don't know about your local climate, but oats and wheat are strictly a fall crop around here.

I learned a lot by going to the LSU Ag Center web site, and the Quality Deer Management Association (QDMA.com)site (http://www.qdma.com/articles/list_articles.asp?id=2). I suggest you search local university and agriculture center web sites for what varieties grow best in your region.

MD, where I live in the Northeast, we have a-lot of Corn Fields and Soy Bean's, after the harvest they plant Winter Wheat, it's cold hardy and they plant it as a ground cover. It's planted usually in November, and yes it grows, I could'nt believe it myself. Also around here the Deer Love Sugar Beets. On one of the spots where they were planted the Deer flocked to them, the snow was deep and the deer buried there heads in it to get to it, around 4;15pm there was a parade of deer everynight to the beets, 20-40 of em everynight. It was actually to easy to get one!

http://www.wildlifeseeds.com/info/usazonemap.html

Found a lot of info there! Looks like the earliest i can plant is April-May and thats Winter Peas. There prices are also expensive as sin. Makin my cheeks pucker over here!

I paid $1 a pound of Iron-Clay peas at our local feed & seed. It comes in 50 lb. bags, but they sell it by the pound also. On that plot you see in the picture I plant 15 lbs. of peas and 4 lbs. Alyce clover in earlyApril,and get full coverage. When the peas get about a foot high the deer hammer them and wipe them out in two or three weeks. By that time the clover is established well enough to recover from their grazing.

Semi,
That's beautiful!

MD,
Like Semi, get that PH where theplants you choose can utilize the fertilizer or you may as well shred dollar bills and and spread them! [:@]

I'd hafta clear 4 feet of snow and then the ground is frozen like a rock. Those summery pictures don't bless me at all.[:'(]

Sorry about that gearhart. (I had to mow my lawn yesterday. The grass is only growing a little, but the weeds and clover were shooting up like crazy.)