When to Fertilize

I know that you can pretty easily kill a food plot with too much too soon, but do you fertilize before you plant? When you plant? After?

It's my understanding that using a liquid fertilizer can be effective, but it's quickly forgotten, for lack of a better term.

Any thoughts? This is for small (1/4 acre) mountain side plot.

I have always put the fertilizer and seed out at the same time and disc it in. On our club land we hire the Co Op truck to spread the seed and fertilizer out at one pass.

P&K need to be something that you have at good levels in the soil ahead of time if possible. Both of those take a little while to become available to the plant after you add them and you would really like for good levels to be available to your seedlings. I think P may take the longest but don’t hold me to that. At planting you ideally might just add a little bit of nitrogen…..it’s not good to put heavy N loads on brand new seedling sprouts and not necessary either….there’s no developed plants to be able to utilize heavy amounts of N….that will take a few weeks…..Heavier N applications really need to come a few weeks after planting when the field starts to become more established and plants are a little more mature. You just don’t want your field to be completely N deficient at planting. If you’re no-tilling and you’ve got a good reserve of OM built up and maybe you had some legumes growin…..then you’ve probably got enough organic N in the soil to get seedlings off and running just fine.

…….or just add 250 lbs of 17-17-17 at planting time.

This is what 99% of people that plant green fields do.

I would agree that a lot of folks still do it that way. I don’t think it’s 99% anymore though. There’s a lot of folks out there now who soil test and apply nutrients more efficiently. I actually won’t have to apply any fertilizer at planting this year. I’ll only have to apply a little bit of nitrogen once it’s up and running.

Ive been doing throw and grow like Grant Woods teaches and have not been fertlizing. I lime when needed

Can't be, CNC is the Professor of Throw and Grow and knows everything! This Woods feller is just a wanta be.

Got alot of ideas from him to, here and old qdma sight

Have you been incorporating cover crops for nutrient needs??? How are the fields doing in late winter...Jan/Feb? The one thing that I don't know if I'll ever be able to do without is a winter application of nitrogen. When soil temps drop below a certain point then the soil activity shuts down....and so does any nutrient processing. You might notice that your field may go N deficient late in the winter but then turn green again once warmer spring weather comes.....I believe that's the soil warming up and your nutrient cycling factory getting cranked back up. That organic N doesn't seem to be getting the job done once the soil temps fall below a certain point though.