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In this issue.... June 2011 Food Plot Update A Favorite Picture Duck! June Food Plot Journal Welcome to the June Food Plot Journal. The weather was much closer to normal this month. Our plots are doing well due to the rain received earlier and the Arrest that we sprayed knocked back the grass. The plots we planted over the Memorial Day weekend are doing pretty well and we finally got the opportunity to plant the rest of the plot in the hayfield. I had planned to spray some of our plots with Slay but have not yet been able to do this. Hopefully I can get this done over the next two months. I spot sprayed Arrest but it was not able to get rid of some of the plants that have encroached on some of our plots. Oldhouse Food Plot The Durana in the oldhouse plot looks good. We mowed the plot on June 9 and spot sprayed with Arrest. The Arrest killed some additional grass, but it did nothing to the weeds that look like a wide blade grass. I need to try the Slay on this weed.
Here is one of our bucks walking through the plot. You can see the clover and the grass-like weeds along with some grass that was killed in this picture. Old Garden Food Plot The Durana clover in the old garden plot is still doing great. We mowed the plot on June 9 and it is one of our best looking plots. I wasn't able to mow this plot with a lawn tractor before it got too high so we used the brush hog to mow it.
The clover in this plot looks real good going into the hottest days of the summer. Middle Clearing Food Plot The Monster Mix in this plot was mowed on June 9 and looked much better than I expected. I thought that there wasn't very much clover left in the plot, but there was a good bit once we mowed the taller weeds away. I had wanted to plow this plot, but I'm holding off on this for now.
This plot is very green and had more clover than I thought it did one month ago. Whippoorwill Food Plot The Monster Mix and Durana in the this plot is still doing well. Weeds have not yet popped up in this plot to any extent yet this year and the plot looks good.
You can see the clover in this plot still looks real nice. Hayfield Food Plot The Durana in Area One still looks good. This plot has an area of a wide blade grass-like weed that I need to take care of and hope to hit with Slay. I mowed this area on June 9 as well and spot sprayed with Arrest to see if it would kill the grass-like weed, but it did not. Even with some weeds there is a lot of clover in this area for the deer.
The Imperial Whitetail Clover we planted about a month ago is doing well. We finally got a chance to plow the rest of Area 2 and on July 2 we disked, applied 160 pounds of lime, 100 pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer, dragged the plot and sowed Antler King Honey Hole. I'm curious how this brassica will perform planted during this time of the year.
The Durana in Area Three is less of a two condition plot than I previously thought. After we mowed it on June 9 we saw a lot of clover throughout the plot.
The Durana in Area Four is still doing good. It's been interesting to see that iffy planting conditions and an application of Arrest a year later has left us with a nice plot of clover. The Monster Mix in area 5 is doing well. The chicory jumped up and the deer nipped a lot of it off in late June. There are some sparse areas in the plot, but overall it has a nice start.
This picture shows Area 3 right down the middle, Area 4 to the left and Area 5 on the right where the clover and chicory look sparse. Right Of Way Food Plot The Durana in the Right Of Way plot is still doing better than I thought it would. I mowed the plot on June 9 and it looks pretty good except for our friend the wide blade grass-like weed.
Here is a decent buck walking through the plot. You can see the clover amongst the weeds.
The weather allowed us to finish plowing and planting and our clover is doing very well. I didn't get to use the Slay herbicide but hope to do so over the next couple of months. The fellow that has mowed our fields in the past is no longer going to do so. This gives us the opportunity to turn the rest of our fields into plots and gives me more room to experiment. Much of this is steep hillside so I'm thinking about some no till options. Trying different things has become much of the fun of food plotting for us and we now have more room to do so. Our Favorite Pictures We get thousands of pictures each month with our digital trail cameras but we narrow down each set of pictures to our favorite six or seven and these are usually buck pictures. As you can imagine there are always several more that are very good but don't make the cut. Below is one of our favorite pictures from June. We've been getting black bear photos on rare occasions and they showed up again one day in June. It's neat getting pictures of them, but they can be very destructive around our feeders. You can take a look at our favorite deer pictures from July 1 here.
Duck! A couple of weeks ago my daughter and I were riding on our four wheeler and I told her to duck when I was about to go under some vines. This reminded me of a time last year when my wife and I were doing the same. I started under the vines and I said “duck”. After brushing under the vines she said that she thought that I had seen a duck and wanted her to look at it. We got a good laugh and thankfully no bruises on her head. I'll have to admit that if I ever saw a duck in our neck of the woods I probably would bring it to her attention, but we've never seen a duck other than some flying over in the fall. The way things go for me we'll probably get a picture of a duck soon and then we can all laugh at me.
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