As a year-round deer hunter, I don’t consider the legal season opener as the start of my hunting season. In fact, there is no start for many whitetail hunters like myself who have never stopped. On the last day of the legal season to hunt, I am already planning for the following year, and acting on those plans during the entire off season.
July is a tough month for hunters like me. It is hot out. Many years it’s extremely dry with drought knocking on the doors. Nasty bugs like chiggers, ticks, and biting flies and mosquitos can be at their peaks. Spring planting has come and gone, and our grain crops that we planted have been sprayed and are either thriving or not. Winter habitat work has long been over if we did any. The next big wave of work that will get us pumped up is of course the fall food plotting season. But we aren’t quite there yet!
There is work to be done in July. It’s not what I would call fun work. In fact, because of the weather and bugs it is anything but fun. Which is why in many cases, hunters skip the dog days of summer in preparing for the fall hunt. That’s fine. But each July I force myself to carry out a few tasks that will aid in fall food plotting and make my hunts more effective.
Fall Green Plots
In another month, hunters will be planting their green food plots in a frenzy much like farmers putting in their spring crops. The trend I see all over the country is hunters spending more and more money on bigger and better equipment. Complete lines of equipment are being manufactured and marketed just for deer hunters. But one thing that separates most hunters and food plotters from a farmer is a lack of equipment. The farmer that rents my tillable ground for example can make a near perfect seed bed with one pass of his field cultivator with attachments. Few hunters can justify spending tens of thousands on equipment to put in a couple acres of food plots each year. And with good reason!
For most of my food plotting life, I put in great food plots with nothing more than a 4-wheeler, sprayer, hand seeder, and drag. With limited equipment it required me to plan a little better. After all, I couldn’t make one pass in my fall plot and see a perfect seed bed.
Thus, July is the perfect time to make sure your fall plots are ready for planting this fall. If you do nothing going into fall, you will most likely find all your fall food plot locations loaded with waist high grasses and broadleaf weeds. Even if you have the ability to cut through all that weed biomass, it is still not a good idea to let your plot acres fill up with weeds that will mature and seed out. Some weed varieties can have thousands of weed seeds per plant, making an unattended to plot more difficult to control weeds in each year. For those plotters with only small equipment, it is very important and will save you hours of work this fall to begin the process of preparing a weed free seed bed for this fall/late summer planting
If you have access to equipment that allows you to mow your plot, mid-summer is a great time to do this. The key is to mow before grasses and other weeds have a chance to mature and drop their seeds. Mow as close to the ground as you can without damaging your equipment. In many cases, a single short mowing will kill off broadleaf weeds. The goal is to prevent maturing and seeding of weeds, while at the same time producing young vigorously growing grasses and weeds that are easily killed off in a couple weeks with a herbicide spraying.
If you don’t have access to mowing equipment, do a chemical burn down of the plot by spraying with the maximum labeled rate of a glyphosate product (Roundup) that you can. If you have hard to kill broadleafs in the plot like horseweed, pigweeds, or thistle, mix in the maximum rate of 2,4-d. I use 2,4-d ester instead of amine because it has a much shorter residual time. A chemical burn down of mature weeds is sometimes very difficult. Young weeds are much easier to kill that mature ones, which is why mowing to promote new growth works well. If chemical burn downs are your only option, July might be your second time for spraying. The point is you may have to spray herbicide several times going into fall to have a nice weed free plot.
If you’ve mowed and sprayed, or just sprayed several times, you should be going into fall food plotting with manageable ground that can be planted with small equipment. In the absence of any equipment at all, a bare plot free of weeds allows you to broadcast seed right on the soil surface with pretty good luck. Winter rye is great for simply broadcast planting.
Fall established plots of clover and/or alfalfa will generally perform better and last much longer too than those seeded in the spring. The reason—much less weed competition and increasing soil moisture. This is more true when you do mowing and chemical burn downs for an entire summer before the fall planting. My best clover stands have always been on plots that have been kept weed free all summer and then seeded in the fall…just something to think about.
Soil Tests
Go on any forum, read any article written by a pro, or watch any You Tube or hunting video, and one of the first steps they’ll tell you when planting a food plot is to test the soil. It requires taking plugs of soil, sometimes several throughout the acreage, then packaging them and sending them to a lab for review. You will get back a soil test report telling you the soil’s pH, Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), percent base saturation of 5 elements, percent organic matter, and the ppm of a host of nutrients. Some labs will tell you what to add to the soil for a crop you plan to plant in that field…like lime to raise the soil’s pH and what fertilizer to add. If you switch crops, you’ll need a new test with new proposed fertilizer additions. If you rely on the lab’s recommendations for fertilizer and lime based on a crop you plan to plant, you’ll need to test every year. If you have multiple plots, say five in total, that’s five tests. A test can be about ten dollars, and a wait of about 10 days total from the time you ship the soil out. Sounds reasonable, I guess?
Understanding the test and what it means can be difficult. The CEC for example can help you decide how much nitrogen to add to the soil for a corn plot at planting, and how much must be added sometime after; as long as you understand what Cation Exchange Capacity means? Base saturation can help you decide if you need to add potash even if your ppm of potash is good. I can tell you, with a high degree of confidence, that I don’t understand all there is to know on a soil test report. I could take my report to an agronomist, that’s a plausible idea? I’m sure there are some co-ops or local ag vendors that would do your soil analysis for you each year, for each plot.
OR, you can do what many very successful farmers do. That is, they will soil test and correct for pH by adding lime to low pH soils. Beyond that, the soil test is not used. In fact, they are only testing for pH. Then, they will simply add nutrients of Nitrogen, Phosphates, and Potash (N,P,K)at a rate that the crop they are planting removes those same nutrients. Some will then do plant tissue samples to determine micro nutrient requirements while the plant is growing, but remember this is to maximize very high yields. This might sound complicated as well, but it’s not at all. In fact, I used to calculate out nutrient removal rates for my favorite food plots like corn, soybeans, or brassicas. But like everything else…there’s an app for that! I use one made by Ag PhD, but there are others.
I’ve been soil testing for pH, and correcting with lime for a long time. But, I only soil tested one time about 25 years ago for fertilizer purposes and haven’t since. Why? Because a very smart farmer introduced me to the replacement method. Now, I measure and correct for pH about every 3 years, and simply fertilize based on the removal rate. My plots are usually great, and when they aren’t it’s due to drought or some other reason…never fertilizer. It’s fast, simple, and costs nothing to fertilize this way. Testing the soil’s pH is also easy as there are a number of garden type pH testers out there that will give you instant pH results. I use litmus paper myself to determine pH. I simply take a plug of soil, mix it with distilled water until I have a slurry, then dip my litmus paper into the slurry. The litmus paper changes color based on my sample’s pH…easy, fast, and cheap!
If you are already taking soil tests, sending them off, and correcting for pH and fertilizing based on their results…and it’s working for you, well by all means keep doing what works. But if you find the whole concept of taking a bunch of soil tests, potentially every year, cumbersome and time consuming, try using the replacement method and some litmus paper this year. Once you get the hang of it, I doubt you will ever go back to paying to have your soil analyzed again. If you haven’t already, by July you should be testing your plots for pH and planning out fertilizer requirements from your test results or based on the removal rates of your plots themselves.
Access Trails
Like I said at the onset, July is not a fun month when preparing for hunting season. But each July, there is one more task that needs to be completed, and July is a great time for it. It’s clearing and spraying access trails. Most of my stands are accessed through cow pastures, along fence lines, or through tall warm season grasses. While you can get away with leaving a little scent behind or making a little noise when you are a quarter mile or more from your stand, once you get close it’s a great practice to have clear paths. I try to clear all my access points of any and all foliage or plant growth for that last 100 yards or so, when possible even longer clearing out debris and spraying my trails for a couple hundred yards leading up to my stands. This allows for the quietest entry and exit, while leaving the least amount of scent behind. Some of this work can be done in spring or late winter, but a spraying of a ground clearing herbicide or glyphosate can only be done during the growing season.
A strong spraying of glyphosate alone will kill the vegetation leading to your stands. Add a little 2, 4-d and you’ll wipe out any and all plants including woody vegetation. This keeps your access quiet, and helps reduce the amount of scent you leave behind. A second application is sometimes needed at the end of summer. This is a great practice to get in the habit of doing.
Preparing for fall plots by keeping your plots clean of weeds, testing for soil pH and correcting for it with lime, and clearing access trails are tasks that can and should be accomplished in the summer. July can be hot and sticky, but doing these three things will help you this fall.