As part of the Intro to Game Management blog series we discussed how food plots are one tenant of game management. This blog entry shows us fertilizing our fall food plots.

 

Last year we detailed food plot creation in our "Food Plot Journey" and I learned a lot about food plots over the course of that blog series. One thing that I learned was that fertilizer can actually damage the seed if you take a couple of wrong steps. We typically try to fertilize when we know rain is coming in the next few days and we also wait until the seeds have germinated before applying the fertilizer. Giving the seed time to take root and grow lowers the possibility of the fertilizer overpowering the seed and "burning it up" as you will hear people often say. Some may use different planting techniques for applying fertilizer, but this is the method we've found successful. When the plants are this young it doesn't hurt to drive the ATV on them. They keep right on growing and pop back up in no time. I can remember how our food plots looked last year before we fertilized them and then how they grew really quickly afterwards and the difference was drastic! I'm excited to see this year's plots grow as well. The key is to have some good rain though. We'll be crossing our fingers and praying for rain again this year.

 

 

 

Stay tuned for more food plot updates coming soon!

 

Regards,

 

Clint