I like to start in mid September and space them out until the first weekend of October. That gives me the chance for at least some of them to catch the rain and make.

But my place in Perry county is consistently the driest area of the state in the fall. Fronts from the NW tend to play out just before they get to me, and rains from the gulf seldom get that far north. Hence, my primary concern on deer plots is not temperature, or palatability, or army worms, but rain.

I've been planting the same fields since the mid 60s, and I've found we usually get a few decent rains in mid to late September, and I want seed in the ground when they come. If the plants come up, they can usually survive the drought that nearly always follows in October. Still, I like to spread them out in the hope that at least some of them will be decent.