Question about lime

I reclaimed an old food plot that is in planted pines. Plot hasn’t been planted in quite a few years. Is bottom land and a sandy soil. Without having time to soil test it would it be wise to go ahead and broadcast some lime? No road for tractor anymore wil have to be hand spread. I have sprayed it twice and even took a weedater and cleaned it up so atv discing will be easier. Plot is in two sections, 10yds by 50 yds and 10 yds by 75 yds.

Lime takes awhile to work. I've put tons of lime before seeing results. Put some lime, fertilize and plant it. Something will come up.

You'll have one heck of a time spreading lime by hand, it's too bulky & dense to do without a tractor & get a significant amount down. You generally can't go wrong by putting out lime in Alabama though. Other problem is that it takes quite a bit per acre to get results. It's nothing to put out a ton per acre on hayfields.

you can get fast acting granulated lime in 30lb bags. it is a quick-fix to help until pelletized takes affect later. I use it in my yard from time to time and it seems to last a couple of months

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I’ve put out 6 bags of this (same type area.long, skinny lane) with a bag type hand crank whirlybird...wasn’t fun and keep a bottle of water handy to wash sweaty lime dusted arms off when done, but it is easily doable with granules. It does not throw well from a pull type spreader, though.

Tractor supply had/has their lime on sale for 3 bags for 9 bucks. Not trying to promote it, but we put out 6 bags on a really small plot the other day. Probably 1/8 of an acre. The soil test called for a ton an acre, so the 240 lbs I put out probably won't do much good this season, but it will do some.

Just plant a corn feeder in that spot and be done with it

just plant rye grass. That stuff will grow on concrete.

Several years ago I put 950 pounds of pelleted lime on a 1/2 acre plot, a year later I soil tested it again and there was no change in the results. I don't know what happened.

Just seed and fertilize the thing. I've got very acidic soils in Alabama and we've never limed. Food plots look fine.

You got that right. My brother bought some land and we I was going use as a hay field free of charge so I was going to get the soil right on it. Done soul samples and it needs 4 tons to the acre in one field the others was fields down at his place was around 1 ton to the acre. We put 1 ton to the acre over the whole place and will slowly work on that bad field s little at a time. But if the OP had a sprayer for his 4wheeler he could use what's called liquid lime it's not really lime but it works the same it works very fast and also goes away fast but it would get him through the season as a patch not a permanent solution

Yea people worry way too much about having the perfect food plot. Deer are goats. In the thick of winter when food gets scarce, the deer are going to come to your plot if it is halfway decent and you don't overhunt it. And they won't graze the thing like a cow. Most of their nutrition will still come from the woody browse in your thickets. I promise you that spending a ton of money liming every plot to perfection isn't going to have hardly any effect on the quality of your deer herd. Having trigger control, good habitat, and good neighbors matters 10x more. Spend that money bushhogging or burning your pines and making openings in your hardwoods.

When the ph gets below 5, the plots will not do very well and you will lose a lot of the attraction of a food plot. I've got a plot on my place that the ph got low enough that clover would germinate and then eventually die and the plots were so sparse that they wouldn't stand up to much browsing pressure. At 5.5 ph and up there is a tremendous difference in deer preference.
In my area, there are lots of deer and lots of food plots. I try to make mine the best in the area and that's where the deer want to be. Lime is one of most efficient amendments you can do and one of the cheapest. You don't have to get your ph to 7 but get it to 6+ and you'll see the difference and so will the deer

You may well be right. I might not know what I'm missing.

I'm not a large-scale plotter either through, so I just buy a few more bags of fertilizer and call it even. My understanding is that the pH is mainly important for nutrient bio-availability, so I usually just add a bit more nutrients at the time of planting. That, combined with the hassle of toting the lime hopper has made me skip liming. I don't think a big lime truck could get to my plots.

Jeff have the soil tested. I'm sure you need lime bad around those pines. I commend you on being willing to do the work. Too many here are just too damn lazy. I had a similar plot and couldn't get anything to it. I bought and spread SLAG. It is a steel mill by product. The results are faster than plain lime. The drawback is a bag around 14x 12" is about 70 lbs. It helped my plot greatly, but I worked my arse off spreading it by hand. Did you see the thread about lime pellets being sold for around $3 a bag? It all depends if you want to provide a great food source to draw deer or a soso plot where you might see one. I always went the extra mile and always saw deer on my lease. Good Luck

Info about slag

slag article

If you have a push spreader, pelletized lime would not be to hard to put out. I would just use the regular lime and not fast acting. There's plenty of time for a soil test to be done. Some seeds have a coating of pH on them for better performance. Plant some rye like said before. That should be a great spot from the looks of it.

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You may well be right. I might not know what I'm missing.

I'm not a large-scale plotter either through, so I just buy a few more bags of fertilizer and call it even.[/quote]


You're wasting money on. That extra fertilizer. Think of it as a dirty window pane your plants are trying to grow through. Fertilizer cleans one side of the glass and lime does the other (both sides are filthy). Cleaning one side of the glass more won't make the other side any less dirty. It's like an engine low on oil and you put more gas in the tank to make up for it. Different deal.