Yes I have to tailor what I plant to take advantage of what is decomposing. This is why I started with beans and peas in the spring, and then went to cereals and brassica's in the fall. The problem was I don't have big enough plots to really plant peas and beans and not have the deer mow them down in a week or two. And that is what I saw with clay peas. The deer would leave them alone until August, and then one weekend, I have a beautiful stand, and the next, all that was there were stems. So I tinkered around some, and really the solution is a mix if I want to do that. Buckwheat, soybeans, clay peas and sunn hemp. All fix nitrogen, and the deer will eat all 4, the least consumed one being the buckwheat.

That works well, and gives me a ton of biomass, but, when I get towards fall, there is no way to broadcast seed into it and then mow it. It's just to thick. Which means I have to mow it, disk it, and then plant it. I want to get out of disking, because one of the things I want in my soil is worms, and disking kills them.

What I have been trying stop doing is what I see every club do. They plant peas in the spring, and then in August, they go and mow them down, spray the fields with roundup and then its another month before anything is planted. So just about the time the deer are really using the plot, you mow down their food, and its 6 weeks before anything viable is there. This is when, especially if August is dry, the deer are struggling in the woods to find good succulent native browse and we are transitioning over to mast.

So I tried broadcasting cereal grains and brassica's into standing beans. That works pretty well. I could probably do this on a couple of my fields. Then its just a rotation each time I plant. But what I also found is I needed something better on the small plots. And this is where I got into the Whitetail clover and Fusion. I actually prefer Fusion, but you have to be careful with broadleaf herbicide, get a little hot and you will kill all the chicory. What I found with these two plantings is the deer hammer them. Especially in August, they seem to really like the chicory. And they stay in them and eat for a while. Usually 30 or more minutes. The turkeys also like the clover. I have one field that has been mowed down since august and no matter how much I fertilize it, between the turkeys and the deer, it stays low. I expect it will start taking off this spring once it warms up. So I probably will not cut it much, if at all this year.

So now, I have to figure out what I can plant in the small clover fields in the fall to increase production, and am going to add some brassica's and awnless wheat. I may need to add some radishes for aeration. What I see with the turnips is they tend to sit on the top of the soil.

I really started all of this 3 years ago. This will be my 4th spring. I seem to run into a new issue each time I solve one. But I am totally convinced the small fields need to be clover/fusion. So that is what I have been focused on from last fall. I think I just need to add in some annual clovers in the fall to add nitrogen in the spring.

And I got some good advice on fertilizer based on my soil sample. So now I get 18-48-0 and 46-0-0. Basically 1 bag of the first and 2 of the second per acre. If I was buying regular Triple 13 or 17, it would take about 10 bags per acre. I need 100 pounds of nitrogen and 50 pounds of the phosporus (or whatever the middle number is) per acre for cereal grains and brassicas. Then I usually do 0-20-20 in the spring, but I will do the 18-48-0 this spring instead. I need enough cereal grains to mow down to start create the biological fertilizer the clover needs. So in theory, at some point, I should need very little additional fertilizer, and can come in with pellet lime now and easily maintain my PH. All I know is it takes a while when I have to put a ton of pellet lime on one field with my 3pt spreader. That is why I would rather just run around to each field and make enough passes to lay down an even layer of it and maintain.

Spring fertilzer bill will be around $200 unless the stuff has gone out of sight. Then in the fall, it will be around 3 times that. And I may have to come back and add more nitogen since that seems to be the engine for decomposition.