Spring season food plot care

If you want to really take advantage of the game available in your area and leverage success in the field, post season food plot care is a must! Spending even just small amounts of time in the field will give you bounds and leaps of quality over the surrounding areas that are competing for the same game animals that you are. Whether it’s deer, duck, dove, turkey, or something in between what keeps them coming is the quality of habitat. Your spring food plot prep will make or break your fall and winter season success in the field. 

Keeping a food plot going. The debate on whether a food plot should be kept year after year or not is one for another day, simply put if you are one of the ones that does keep a specific area of your property maintained for wild game with some sort of forage

on an annual or bi annual basis than this is for you. Spring time is the time of growth, flora is blooming and taking root. Most people planted annual forage seeds back in late summer or early fall in preparation for deer or other game. In the spring time you are presented with the perennials that you might’ve planted that are starting to flower or bud. Allowing your natives that are healthy for your plot and the old crop plants from last year to grow and bud. A good principle to keep in mind is that most often less is more. Most of us don’t have each hour of every day to dedicate to keeping a food plot in pristine shape anyways. Make sure that you're not just dumping chemicals on your food plot during the spring to try and control weeds. Weed control should be a gradual and slow process. If you go too fast you can overdose your plants and soil and actually lose a lot of the good nutrients and plants that you want. Some good all around herbicides that we recommend are as follows:

1- Arrest Max: used for control of annual and perennial grassy weeds in food plots mainly consisting of clover.

2- Pendimethalin: Used to control the emergence of weeds from seed and other plants from seed to allow only current crop prevalence. SHOULD NOT BE USED within 4 months of planting forage seed.

3- 2-4,d: Best for light control on most broadleaf weeds.

What about fertilizers? If you have never thought about putting down calcium for your plot we recommend that being your first step. Getting calcium on your plot through the use of granulated ag lime tends to be the most conservative route of doing this. We also like to see some sort of nitrogen added after the second or third week of germination, but this can also be put down as a slow release product during the spring to help nutrients throughout the year. Timing your fertilizer with rain coming in is pretty important, we typically try to avoid putting down fertilizer during the heat of the summer or when we know we’re not going to be getting a good amount of rain after application. Again use these products in moderation and don’t over do it! Please don’t apply Urea derivative nitrogen either, typically anything over (34-0-0)... Just stick to a (33-0-0) or lower; it's safer for your grazing animals if you have any and also safer for your herd. A side note that falls under fertilizer and chemical application is making sure that you're fitting against fungus and plant disease. They make a plethora of products that can be used for fighting fungus issues and plant disease. 

Spring food plot care pricing and time spent: You might be asking yourself how much you are willing to spend on all of this? That’s a great question and if you plan to take on most of what we’ve talked about in this article you would be looking at spending anywhere from $500.00 - $1,200.00. This of course depends on how big an area you are dealing with treating and what all you want to apply. We recommend taking it slow, starting with just some fertilizer is always the best bang for your Buck! 

Looking for a new fishing shirt to add to your arsenal? Check out our glide series here!