Summer training continues..….Been playing a lot of “chase the dog with the deer leg” here lately......…..3 months to go….the countdown begins….C’mon deer season!!!

Pass the salt shaker.............

Throw and mow tomato plants?

The damn deer are murdering my peas. Gonna have to throw out some milorganite.

Kind of.....just using some of the same general no-till principles as what I'm using in the bigger field.

Good luck!.....I've thrown in the towel with trying to grow that type stuff without an e-fence.

loprofile.....You still out there? How's your millet patch coming along?

I put 250# of feet out today and it's been raining for the past hr. Got a half inch yesterday and from the looks of it gonna get a inch or so time this rain quits. My peas should really jump in the next week or two.

Good timing…..I’m hoping that rain slides on over here. I added 100 lbs/ac of 34-0-0 to my field as well and could use another shower to soak it on into the ground. Things were starting to run a little N deficient on me. I’ve decided to go ahead and push the vegetation enough so that I can double crop the biomass this summer. I’ll probably mow toward the end of this month or maybe early August. What I’m also hoping to do is leave myself with a little lighter biomass load to mow come fall planting. More pics to come......

Hey CNC have you heard of holganix? Supposedly they have something you can spray and raise your cec by 5 points in a year using microbial growth. Guy was trying to talk me into using it on the landscape side and was telling me about it. 257 may have heard of them they are supposedly getting big into the crop industry but today was the first I've heard about them.

I haven’t heard of it. I’ll check it out though and see what its about.

I watched a video of one of their spokesman doing a presentation and it sounds like to me they are selling something to basically “inoculate” your soil with microbial activity. It’s a big missing link in many fields that have been tilled for years. The soil just becomes a sterile medium with little life after a while. How much it will help or whether you should use this product?.....I really don’t know enough about it to say. I will say that one of the reasons folks recommend using chicken litter is the fact that it is teeming with microbial activity and helps reintroduce that aspect to your soil. That seems to be similar to what the Holganix product is doing. Once you go no-till for several years, then your microbial community should be able to be taken care of through your management practices instead of through applying them from a bag. A lot of what were doing with feeding biomass to the soil is in turn feeding this microbial community and creating a hospitable environment for them to live in.

I’ve watched some more of the videos on this Holganix stuff out of curiosity. These guys have actually found a good niche to tap into for their business. I notice that it seems like they are marketing a lot to turfgrass managers….like golf courses or ballfields, etc….One of the big things that those managers are missing and can really do nothing about is diversity. They can only grow grass. That lack of diversity above ground also creates a lack of diversity below ground. We as food plot managers have the option of being able to grow diversity in our plots though. With plant diversity comes a home for microbial diversity……and one of the big reasons why we want our soil teeming with microbial diversity is because it is this microbial community that is responsible for mineralizing the soil nutrients and making them available to the plant.

I’d say that this product would likely help you in the beginning but for sure take that with a grain of salt. I feel like you could do pretty much the same thing though with chicken litter but I know that’s not available to everyone. This product may actually be a lot more diverse in what it contains. However, keep in mind though that if you throw an animal out into the middle of the desert it will eventually die. The Holganix is actually putting in temporary food sources in their product to give the microbial life something to run on for a while. Long term though, the bigger picture will depend on how you manage the soil. If you manage for a biological desert then the process will cease...the soil animals will die. In order to keep the cycle going you have to create a home for the microbial community. If not, you’ll just need another bag…and another bag….and another bag.

There was another similar product someone posted up awhile back that was basically selling the benefits of organic matter in a bag. You see, organic matter in a nutshell adds negative ions to your soil that creates more sites for our positively charged nutrients to bond to. Basically what these folks had done is to refine a product down to being a bag full of those negative ions. You buy the product, spread it on your field, and it very likely does work and help. But you have to keep the bigger picture in mind and it’s the same thing I’m saying about this Holganix product. I can continue to keep my soil void of organic matter and buy the benefits of it from a bag…..or I can manage the soil differently and create organic matter on my own. It’s not to say that the products don’t work or won’t help….it’s just saying to be mindful of why you’re using them.

Catheadbisuit.....If you can ever get this teaweed established I believe you’ll be good to go. As summer progresses, I’m starting to find more and more of it and everything points to it being very hardy and easily spread. Here it is establishing itself amongst crabgrass with no problem. I’m going to give serious consideration to spraying with a grass select herbicide next year and seeing if I can release more of these broadleafs.




Here it is in an area that I frequently mow. Nearly everything you see in the foreground growing with the grass is teaweed. It actually appears to thrive with the cutting. If it can stand up to me mowing it weekly then I believe it’ll handle just about any amount of browsing pressure you could throw at it.

We're still plodding along. Slow but steady growth on about 10 to 12 seedlings in pots. The Jiffy Pot things seem to germinate pretty good but they dry out too easily once you lift the lid off. Just looking to keep them alive to end of Aug and transplant.

There are a lot of wild plants that are high in nutrition that deer feed on all the time. Plain old Beggar Lice that you would find in the same area as the ironweed might be better than a ironweed, and quail and other wildlife feed on the seeds.

I’d be happy to have beggar lice in my field along with everything else. The thing that I find intriguing about this teaweed is that I haven’t seen many plants that the deer prefer this highly that will also stand up to intense browsing pressure it receives. An added bonus is that the nutritional value of the teaweed rivals some of the best summer foods like soybeans. It looks like you better want it for sure if you get it started….. I can definitely see why it’s considered to be aggressive. I’m good with that though.

To be honest, I’m not too overly concerned what happens in my field during the summer as long as it's actively growing, producing biomass, and keeping my soil protected for fall plots. Come Oct 15 or Jan 20….it matters very little what I did or didn’t grow in my plot back during the summer. Deer start shifting patterns and honing in on fall and winter food sources starting around the latter part of Sept and everything changes up. Those deer that have been scattered about all around me during the summer begin to filter in…..and as the winter progresses, they become more and more concentrated

CNC - Millet update. Planted 3 acres in south Montgomery - split in half two weeks apart. Lucky so far with rain. Last weekend some parts of field were thick with millet and others not so much. Fertilized Saturday and plenty of rain since. Will check this weekend and update.
Also did the same thing on five acres in Macon County. Have not been back over there but probably will this weekend.

Good deal!...I wouldn't be surprised if you see some areas of the field do better than others. With this being the first time doing a no-till planting, you'll likely have some areas of the field that will need "conditioning" before they really do well. Much of it revolves around holding moisture.

My hope for this teaweed is to establish it along edges inside the drip line of trees so it can be left to flourish until frost when it is said to go to some level of dormancy. Leaving the inner field available for other perennials like clover and chickory. The tick trefoil would be a good addition too.

The idea of starting it in pots to begin with is an attempt to create some hardy specimens for transplanting at same time as broadcasting the remainder of the seed in a raked bed in late august or early september. I think some of my problems with germination may be related to storing the seeds inside where it is air conditioned. but that is pure wild azz guessing at this point. I plan to move them to a warmer location for a couple of weeks before planting.