Sep
8
Written by:
Clint Patterson
9/8/2010 4:31 PM
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Adam riding the ATV using the GroundHog MAX |
If you’ve been reading along, then you know we are on the second half of our year-long, Tecomate Seed, Food Plot Journey. We learned a lot during the past summer about food plots and even had some food plots that came up pretty well. Though, we did have one weed infested food plot that didn’t turn out as well as we hoped, but it served as a good learning experience for us. We’ve been getting some good game cam pics of deer in the plots (mostly does on camera though) and for the past few weeks we’ve been working on our fall plots.
We’re putting our fall plots in some different locations and we are carrying out the same processes of taking a soil sample, preparing the soil, liming, planting, and adding fertilizer (if needed) in all these locations. The main difference between the summer and fall plots is that we’re planting plants that can grow in cold weather for our fall plots. Over time the frost and cold will end up killing what we planted for our summer plots. I will note that so far throughout the process with the fall plots everything has been really dry. I mean every time we do anything there is dust flying everywhere. After riding the GroundHog MAX last weekend for a few hours I was covered in dirt and my eyes were burning. I looked in the mirror and my whole face was covered in orange dust. I say all that to say…if we don’t get some rain soon, I’m not sure what is going to grow in such dry soil. Again, I’m a web guy and don’t claim to know much about farming and/or food plots so I may be surprised, but for now I’m still hoping we get some rain to have some kind of moisture in the soil.
At this point we’ve taken the soil samples and are now preparing the soil. By preparing the soil I mean we have sprayed the envisioned plot with RoundUp to get the weeds out and gave them time to die. The weeds died and the video will demonstrate this as you can easily see the stark contrast between the dead brown weeds and the dark green weeds on the other side of the hill. I was actually surprised at how well the RoundUp did with only spraying it once. Initially I thought we’d have to spray it a little bit more to get it all to die since there were a ton of weeds, but I was wrong in that assumption. We waited about a week and a half and then came back to get the weeds out by disking up the soil. Thus far, we have been disking up the soil by using the GroundHog MAX, but for this large area we brought in a tractor to assist.
We’re trying to put in this particular plot in an area that was an old power line. The power line is long and narrow and we’re trying to install the plot at the lower end that leads down to a creek. This place hasn’t been touched in about 2 – 3 years so the dirt there is hard and dry. The lower area of the power line has steep hills and rough terrain. These hills, rough terrain, and narrowness of the old power line combine to present a difficult situation for the tractor with regards to plowing. Parts of the power line are more flat and in those areas the tractor did well, but the other areas near the bottom presented more of a challenge for the tractor. So, as you would imagine, we brought in the GroundHog MAX and it got the job done again! The GroundHog MAX greatly helped us out in those hard to plow locations. Ultimately the soil in this plot was plowed by a combination of the tractor and GroundHog MAX with the tractor handling the flatter, upper end and the GroundHog MAX on the more rugged, lower end.
Before/After Pic of the Remote Food Plot on the Powerline
It took a lot of time to get the soil the way we wanted, but in the end I think it looks pretty good given what we started out with. Again, this dirt was very hard and very dry so I think we made some good progress. We’ll try to continue to install food plots in these areas year after year and over time we think it will get a little easier if we stay on top of it.
I’m praying for some rain so keep your fingers crossed. Now we’ll give the power line food plot a week or two to see if anything germinates…that is we’ll wait to see if any more weeds start growing back. In our first go round with our summer plots, we sprayed a field and got a good kill on the weeds then we disked the field up and planted. The field ended up being full of weeds because the plowing covered some of the dormant seeds with dirt and moisture and then they germinated which lead to a mess by the time it was all said and done. So we’ll see if any weeds start to come up and if they do, then we’ll spray it again to kill them…then we’ll wait a little while and put the seed out. We’ll probably also put down some lime and fertilizer, but we’re still waiting to get the soil samples back before we assess that situation.
I made the below video to show you what the area looked like after the spray and to give you an idea of how we worked both the tractor and the GroundHog MAX together to get the soil the way we wanted it.
And the journey continues…
Regards,
Clint