-By Rich Miller
I have one more week until the opening of deer season. Most of the bucks I am getting on camera are all out of velvet sporting those polished up hard antlers. Over the last week I have found a lot of horned trees and several pawed places. I have a camera on one of the pawed places, but I haven’t been back to check it yet. I think several different bucks are using the same place; I just want to see if they are any size.
In the last couple of weeks we have been getting a little rain and it is really starting to show in my food plots. We planted a couple of plots last week just in time for the rain. I have been using the Moultrie ATV Spreader for spreading my seed and fertilizer, and man, you talk about making things easy. In one afternoon we planted three different fall food plots in just a few hours. We already had the ground prepared so all we had to do was fertilize and seed. It took more time to drag in the fertilzer than it did to spread and seed. Even planting clover and chicory, which is really small seed, was easy. We simply closed the adjustable gate down and it broadcasted the seed very evenly without over doing it.
I got into a discussion with some guys over food plots at a show last weekend and they were asking “how big a food plot should be?” My opinion is no larger than you can do it right. What I mean is when planting your food plot don’t make it bigger than your means. Whether it be means of your equipment or wallet. I would rather have a small plot that is planted and fertilized the right way than have a big plot that is just seed on the ground called a plot. Don’t till up three acres of ground to plant if you are only buying enough fertilizer for a one acre. When you read a bag of seed and it says the plants will have 38% protein, they should have a disclaimer that says “only in ideal conditions with proper liming and fertilizing.” Also, more seed isn’t better. When you purchase a bag of seed it will have the instructions on the bag of how many pounds of seed per acre. Most of us will have to guess at that, but try not to over do it. When planted correctly the one acre plot will produce more forage than the three acres will, and we will get a lot better return on the investment we call food plots.
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