Sesame

So I bought a bag of Sesame from Hancock and have never grown it before. I remember that somebody on here grew a crop last year; any tips on how to grow it? I don't have a working planter, so all I can do is broadcast it. Will it outcompete the weeds like browntop does, or do I need to use a pre herbicide?

I would not think that it needs to be covered much, but do I want a firm seedbed? There were some reviews on Hancock that said it didn't come up. I suspect they planted too deep. Any ideas appreciated.

Are you going to flood it? If so I'd just top sow on the mud.

No, just planting it as part of a dove field. I'm gonna give my uncle most of the bag, as he has a much better dove area than I do, but I thought I'd plant a acre or so.

If the Sesame seeds are like the ones we're all familiar with, definitely top sow, those seeds are tiny.

I actually talked farmer buddy of mine about this last week mr. Steve. He said he scorches the earth first, and also uses a post emergent. Says the weeds will take over. I’ll try to find out what he sprays if you want.

Yes, please ask him. We don't know what herbicides sesame will tolerate.

Carmex

Thanks! Is he applying it as a pre or post, or both? Can you ask him what rate he is using? The field I am gonna plant it in has johnsongrass and sicklepod in abundance. Browntop will get ahead of them and make a crop anyway, but I think I will have to use herbicide to make a sesame crop. Just looking, I'm not finding any information on sesame herbicides. If your friend wouldn't mind talking to me, I would sure like to call him.

I’ll pm you his number Mr. Steve. Jeremy is his name. Great guy

I tried a bag of sesame year before last on my dove field. Gly the field about 10 days before planting and broadcast the seed. I planted mine in rows and thought I would never get over 2 inches tall but it finally took off. The seeds really didn’t mature until like late October. I left it standing because it was too late by them to really do any good. I will just stick to strips of millet from now on. I will note this was planted on really good dirt that had fertilizer put on it before planting maybe it was just old seed but it was slow to mature I do know that.

PM to you Mr. Steve

Same thing happened to me a few years back. Matured late and hard to get seed out of the hull. Plant early.

So when did y'all plant to have it mature so late? I've read it takes 120 days, and soil temp needs to be over 70. I guess I will try it first of May and see how it does. Though if it will stand until the late season that could be a good thing. I can always "plant" wheat for the early season, and I was also gonna plant some millet. Thanks for all the ideas!

Planted mine first week of may with high hopes lol could not believe how slow they started and I seemed like forever before they started to head out. I’m going to do a few strips of sunflowers again using the broadcast method I used last year with good results. Broadcast was so much easier and actually turned out better for dove feed than when I planted them with a planter.

Was first week of may a good time to develop mature seed for the opener? If not earlier or later planting date?

Late may for the sunflowers and millet.

Don’t remember the planting date on the sesame. Dropped it from the lineup.

Browntop and dove proso millet seem to do much better for us.

Good luck with it.

I helped my uncle plant his field Wednesday. It is new ground that had been in mature pine timber, so we had to farm over and around the stumps. We used an all purpose plow that has 9 shanks and it got the ground into fairly decent shape. We just broadcast the seed and fertilizer, starting with a strip of Egyptian wheat on each edge and another down the middle. Then we put an acre of sesame and an acre of millet in between the strips. He has a good 3 pt hitch cultipacker, and it did a good job of leveling the field and covering the seed as the final step. All we need now is rain.

I bought a jug of diuron, but his sprayer wasn't working and since it is new ground we are hopeful that the weeds won't be too bad this first year. I am planning a similar field on my place next week and will spray the diuron as a pre on the sesame. If the sesame doesn't do well, we can always plow it under and put browntop on it the first of July.

I've gotten to where I quit planting anything for Doves. Usually only get one shoot per field. I just top sew wheat these days.....

The fields look pretty good 5 weeks after planting. The field my uncle and I planted has gotten several good rains and is doing really well. The other field I planted had some soil moisture when I planted, so some came up and some didn't. Then it went 3 weeks without a drop of rain and after that got several inches in one day. The diuron requires rain to activate, so I didn't get good weed control. Now we are back to drought, with no rain in sight.

It still oughta make some dove food if it will ever rain.

I planted mine last week mr. Steve. Soil was fairly moist, but no rain on it yet. We’ll see

Here's a picture for anyone interested in Sesame. This is 49 days after planting, and it had only one rain. I'm very surprised that it looks as good as it does. I have read that sesame is very drought resistant, so that idea is definitely being tested. One of the things I wondered about was how well the sesame would shade the ground and block out the weeds once it was up and growing. It seems to be doing that very well. There is a little johnsongrass in it, but I don't think it will reduce the yield a lot.

The Egyptian wheat is still getting taller and hasn't produced any seed heads. The dove magnet mix that has several different types of millet has already produced a lot of seed. I just need it to rain. My uncle's field continues to get rain and looks much better.

I went and looked at my sesame this morning Mr. Steve. Looks like it just sprouted and is about 3/4” tall

I sure hope you get more rain than I have. After another week of 100 degree heat and no rain, the plants are close to death. I don't think I've ever seen it this dry this early in the year.

We got a good one yesterday evening

My friend who owns the field just text and said they got 2” yesterday. Hopefully it wasn’t too late

We planted the wms dove magnet with the sesame in it this year. The sesame is really doing good. Our field is looking great. Sunflowers started opening today and we got an inch of rain this afternoon. The only thing I haven’t noticed is the grain sorghum but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere

I've finally gotten some rain, but haven't been able to check the field. It will be interesting to see if it has recovered.

[img]https://imgur.com/a/R0YwTQt[/img]
Sesame we planted in the dove magnet mix on 5/1. Not sure how to get the pic to show up.

Amazing what a little rain will do:




The Dove Magnet mix has already made a good crop, and the sesame looks like it still has a chance to make one. Just need a few more rains. There are some millets in the dove magnet that I've never grown before, but they have made an impressive amount of seed.

Looks really good! Is that Pearl millet that has made so much? Mine has produced a lot of those seedheads too, and each one has a bunch of seed in it. If I don't get any doves from this field I am giving up on them

I think that is the German foxtail with the large heads on it. There was also dove proso and white proso in the mix. I’m very impressed with how everything has turned out. Most of the sunflowers are open now too. I broke one of the seed pods open on the sesame and there were hundreds of seeds in it. I feel the same way, if the doves don’t come to this field then they just aren’t around.

I think you are right; I've never grown either before. I meant to save the tag that listed all the different plants in that mix, but I seem to have lost it. The tag didn't match what their website said; they may vary it depending on what they can get. I have grown proso before, but there is a plant in the mix that has a much taller stalk than what I grew in the past. That proso looked very similar to browntop.

Edit: I did a little research and the taller stalk millet is White Proso.

The dove magnet has really made a lot of seed, and should start to dry out with the hot weather expected next week. It's interesting that you have sunflowers with no grain sorghum; mine is just the opposite with a lot of heads of sorghum and not a single sunflower. I have never been able to make sunflowers on this place. The deer usually eat them as soon as they come up, but I don't know if that is what happened here.

For anyone interested in Sesame, it is still blooming and the plants are still growing and adding pods. Some of the plants already have over 50 pods. I cut a pod open and it looks like there's over 100 seed in each. The seed are bigger than millet and I can see why doves would like them.

My biggest concern goes back to what several of you warned about from the start - will the seed ever be available for the doves? I would think it's going to require the plants being very dry and then slowly going over them with the bush hog, but even then I wonder how well the seed will scatter. Anyone got any advice on that?

I will let most of it stand until the second season if it will. It should be interesting to see what it does and how the wildlife deals with it.

At seed maturity could you spray a defoliation herbicide or just gly? Seems if you had a dead plant and then bush hogged it would help disperse the seed. I’ve heard folks bush hog then burn to get the residue out of the field and the seeds stay intact.

I know several folks around here that spray there sunflowers at maturity to kill them in order to speed up the drying process.

Thanks guys, I've used gly on browntop to make it dry quicker, and I've seen places that have been burned afterwards. It has seemed to me that gly and then burning makes an ideal dove field, but the problem is that it doesn't last. The first time it rains, the seeds sprout and that's the end of it. If you are planning for one big shoot, that's probably the way to do it, but I'd rather keep feed available for most of the season, and into the second season if possible. You can't plant wheat in the second season, so any crop that will last until then would be ideal.

I would think that the bush hog would scatter it if it's dry enough, I'm wondering if much of the seed will naturally fall to the ground if I do nothing. Anyone tried this? Will those pods stay in the plant, or will they start dropping off once it has finished growing? Do other things like turkeys knock the plants over to get at the seed?

I don't think I have ever seen a sesame plant growing before, so I am just experimenting here. Be interesting to see if the turkeys will eat it; I'm pretty sure none of them have ever seen one either.

Could you do an area at a time? Like divide your field area in quarters or whatever works best? I’ve done a field where we cut some and left some standing to be able to hide in the un cut and shoot over the cut. Some dove were hard to find that landed in the uncut but it was good work for the dog.

Oh yeah, I will definitely manage it in strips. Thanks for the idea. The dove magnet is on one side, and the sesame on the other, with a narrow strip of Egyptian wheat in between. I planted it mainly for a place for the hunters to hide. We planted my uncle's place the same way.

We both have room to plant a strip of wheat every week, so the plan is to get as many hunts as we can.

Hope y’all get several barrel burners off of yalls fields! Hope to see some pictures of how it all turns out

It takes a long time. I think it was January before the pods naturally cracked and dropped seed last year.

Very helpful information here! Thanks for this thread!

I went and checked on our field today. It’s coming along pretty good. I walked up on this section and could hear the buzzing from all the bees. Seemed like every flower had a bumblebee or a honey bee in it.

Nice looking field, whack n stack!

I think the only way mine could be ready for opening day would be gly it now. It's still blooming, so I plan to just let it grow.

It’ll keep blooming and die as soon as the first frost hits it. But if you wanna hunt it opening day, id spray it next week, bush hog it, and burn it.

Thanks. I'll spray a strip next week and then bush hog it the next. I don't plan to hunt it opening day, so not in a big hurry.

For anyone interested in Sesame, here is a stalk with pods that are starting to crack open. I sprayed this spot with gly last week and that caused the pods to start to break open. I think it needs to dry at least another week before a bush hog is gonna do a good job of spreading the seed. I've sprayed about a third of the field.

The dove magnet has produced a whole lot of seed, but I have very few doves. There is fresh harvested corn a few miles away and it's hard to compete with that.

My sesame is doing well, and the best looking tallest plants are the ones that were initially shaded by the proso millet. Some of those are 36” plus.

After running the bush hog over the sesame that has already been sprayed, here is what the ground looks like:



Unfortunately, few doves have gotten the memo. I didn't plan on an opening day shoot, and it's a good thing I didn't. I think I am giving up, but it does appear that sesame could be a good crop for them in dove country. Good luck to all shooting today.

I took this picture yesterday morning. This stuff was planted in early may and is just now losing the leaves and quit flowering.

That's an interesting picture; thanks for adding it to the discussion. One thing I can see is that I planted mine a lot denser than you did. It looks like your individual plants are mostly forked and putting out several main stems. It looks like they have produced a lot of pods. It's a good looking field with a lot of dove food. I think you can manage it to produce doves all the way to the end of the last season if you are interested in doing that

Here's the last picture I have of mine; I think it was made September 10:



You can see that nearly all of my plants are a single stem, though they all still produced a lot of pods. All the leaves and blooms were long gone when I made the picture. The green you see is sicklepod. I didn't get any rain for a month after planting and the herbicide didn't work very well. Still, I don't think the weeds hurt production a whole lot. They were mostly behind the sesame and didn't get to it's height until the sesame was done.

The pods are cracked open and gradually dropping seed. During the heat of the day, the doves will get in the standing sesame, but late in the afternoon they will be in the bush hogged part where the seed is thick on the ground.

My dove field was a failure, but I think it was due entirely to the fact that there just aren't many in the area. I don't plan to try again at this location, but will help my uncle at his place. I will say that my doves had a choice of wheat on bare ground, a dove magnet field that was mostly millet and mowed clean, bush hogged strips of Egyptian wheat, or sesame, and they chose the sesame 100%. I never saw more than 25 at any one time, but every last one of them was always in the sesame. I think it can be a great dove food if you have doves.

Good luck getting to shoot yours.

For reference purposes, here’s what my stand looked like after the first cold snap last week. Pods just now started to crack.

Those look like they have a lot of seed in them; good luck drawing in some birds