Plant profile and discussion

Over the next several days I would like to transition through different food plot seed types. I want to encourage meaningful discussion including but not limited to varieties, success, strengths, deer preference, strategies for planting, etc. The topics I plan on creating threads for are Cereal Grains including Cereal Rye, Oats, Wheat, and Triticale, Clovers Perennial and Annual, Winter Peas, Chicory, and Vetch.

Today I would like to start with Cereal Grains: Have at it.

I prefer rye and tricticale and so do my deer.

Blend of all of them is best IMO. Wheat, oats, rye

I like BFO's if I can find them, mixed with Yuchi arrowleaf clover.

I use a lot of wheat like most people, but I tried cereal rye for the first time last year and had good luck with it. It had been hard for me to find previously.

Hard to beat cereal rye for best all around cereal grain........

We did the same as well this past year. They seem to have liked it. I think it got browsed more than the wheat of previous years. We are going to half some fields next yr and plant them side by side with exclusion baskets and see which they prefer.

From my experience Oats and Rye are the best. You can't beat the versatility of rye though. What do you guys say about clover?

I planted my oats in late September and broadcast the clover on top before a rain. I had a good oat patch, but the deer hammered it hard and the clover suffered. I'm going to try and get back up there this weekend and check the clover. I guess it is the deer population, but they love BFO's and it has a hard time getting a picture book look to it. It is sort of funny to see some of the pictures of some plots and some look like there aren't any deer feeding in the plots.

Many of the plots I see just aren’t big enough and/or productive enough to keep up with the browsing pressure. We’ve become conditioned to thinking that a food plot should look like a putting green. That's not necessarily true though.

Great point. Deer coming to it during day, getting nutrition, and holding deer is my goal. Whatever it looks like does not matter to me. Ryegrass makes a beautiful field. I don't use it on my test throw and mow fields, but I have had some great results with winter peas. I research and test a lot. Ive compared neutragreen, whistler, and austiran winter peas. As far as one against the others I had best results from the Whistler. I hear it is because of the lack of tannin in the whistler and neutragreen. I don't know why they browsed them heavier than the neutragreen though. Both have white flowers.

What I was getting at is not necessarily if the plot looks pretty but rather how we commonly look at a plot and if it’s not eaten down to a nub then we assume its not being used. We have grown accustomed to thinking every winter plot should look like it’s been scalped. What that hides though is that a lot of that situation is created by poor soil conditions and lack of productivity just as much as it comes from browsing pressure. It isn’t hard to browse a field down to a nub when its not putting out any growth. This is one reason I like cereal rye….it grows better in poor soil conditions than other cereal grains……it grows at lower temps than other cereal grains……and it grows faster than other cereal grains……That works out well for many situations

My favorite is cereal rye, it's the backbone of my plots, but I use all of them. As far as clovers, I love durana,crimson, and yucchi.

Sorry cbc, I misunderstood what you were saying. I have found my favorite blend of clover now. I do durana, mihi Persian, and yucchi along with some chicory. I found that it feeds deer a long time.

Anyone have any luck with Chicory or vetch?

Two or three years back I planted wheat, oats and clover (crimson and durana) on my 2 plots and they were pretty much eaten to the dirt. The next year I added Elbon rye after reading how much faster it regrew, especially in colder winters. I found that to be true, but I don't think they hit it quite as hard as the oats and wheat. They still hit it pretty good though. It is much hardier than wheat and much, much hardier than oats.