Toothdoc, i made them on any semi flat ground that i could find. If you don't have any flat ground, you could get a dozer to bench out a spot. I grow just about everything. The key is to get a soil sample and follow it. I've grown rye/wheat/oats/cc/durana/yucchi/rape/turnips/radish/sunflowers/buckwheat/peas/beans/milo/millet and several more. The key is to build your soil. PM me your email address and i'll send some pictures showing what i started with and how you can improve it fairly quickly.

If I was in that situation, I’d have to really give a look at planting plots in the “bottoms” if there was any way possible and make the hills and ridge tops into bedding. Ridge tops are usually just so dry that you’re putting yourself behind the 8-ball simply from the site selection alone. Good soil moisture is a major component to growing good fields.

Update on the field……Nothing special…..just "natural vegetation" with a some clover patches here and there. Everything is nice and green though and I’ve counted close to 30 different plant species growing around the field…..many of which have been browed. The patches of durana are still hanging in there. All the rain we're getting has really helped. It’s important to have your pH and Ca levels right with that stuff but water is really just as important. It probably won’t rain a drop next year after I spend the money to reseed it this fall. That's food plotting for you though. A lot of those other plants you see growing toward the back of the pic (other than the dogfennel) is teaweed. Deer will start hammering that stuff soon. It wouldn’t bother me a bit to have a field slap full of clover and teaweed……Cheap, low maintenance, highly browse tolerant, low risk of failure, etc.....

Something funky going on with this buck. Not sure what kind of issues he's having....Injury maybe?

That's a damn ugly deer there. I bet the other deer make fun of him.

Maybe that's how he broke his antlers. Somebody called him ugly and got dealt with.

Yep. The deer round here don’t play.....#ThugLife

A pic of Shelby sitting in a patch of teaweed. I’ve been lucky and just had it come in naturally. The folks I’ve seen try to establish teaweed from scratch seem to struggle with getting it started. If we could figure out how to successfully plant it….I think it would be a very viable summer option for our little plots with high pressure. It’s virtually no maintenance, no cost once it’s established. That's some stray black-eyed peas in the bottom left that I threw out in the field one day. I'm amazed the deer haven't gotten them yet. I probably just gave them the kiss of death by even mentioning it.



Here’s the same area at the end of last summer. Look at the exclusion cages toward the back of the patch. They browse teaweed heavily during late summer. Did I also mention that it’s highly nutritious….rivaling plants like soybeans and alfalfa in terms of nutritive value.

Y’all know I can’t help but to experiment with something. The itch got to be too much. With much of the summer vegetation beginning to harden off, I decided to break the disk out for the first time in 5 years and try to simulate a mob grazing. I took a lot of the angle out of the disks compared to how I used to have them set. I think I still need to take more bite out of it. It cut a little more than I wanted in a few places. I’m not trying to plow dirt but rather just trample down the vegetation while slightly stimulating the soil surface….hopefully promoting some new tender growth. If you’re just starting to try to turn around really poor soil then this is something I probably wouldn’t worry about trying until you start really growing some heavy crops of biomass and have a good layer of rich topsoil built up.





I left this strip across the center of the field so that the dog fennel will create a screen to give the back of the field more security. I’ve got it divided into two (1 acre) fields now.

BLASPHEMY!!!

Looking good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.....I knew somebody would give me a hard time.

To be fair, I'm not trying to "till" at all even though I'm using a disk. Ideally I'm only wanting to stimulate the soil surface a little to stir up the seed bank while knocking back the growing vegetation. We'll see what happens. I need some rain now.

So my dozer/mulcher work should be finished this weekend. He will pull soil samples, but the soil looks gorgeous and way more organic than I expected. What should I plant this fall as fall/winter plot? Cereal Rye and clover? Should I add in some brassicas, turnips, radishes? WHat do yall think of some of the pre-mixed wildlife plot mixes without ryegrass from say hancock etc? I know a lot of it is trial and error, but I'm hoping to reduce the error component.

Just a base mix of cereal rye and clover works well. You could also go with one of the mixes of cereal rye, wheat, oats, crimson clover but make sure to not let it start running N deficient around Christmas. Adding turnips in is fine if you want to add a little something extra but again make sure not to skimp on the nutrient issues or you'll have a bunch of rank yellow leaves. I'd probably just wait and see what you're soil tests look like and then go from there. Lime nay be far more important right now than anything.

It's hard not to get ahead of myself. I'm excited to get moving forward.

I completely understand.....

Got fertilizer and millet in, now just letting it soak up all this rain.

I thought I’d give an update since trying the simulated “mob grazing” experiment……..

I’ve actually had a run of bad luck on rainfall ever since. My neighbor only two miles down the road has gotten over 3 inches of rain while in the same time period I’ve only gotten 0.3 inches. I’ve been barely missed by several good showers. So we're basically just sitting idle for the most part.



Oh, well…..that’s just the way it goes sometimes. I’m still in really good shape to plant in a couple months. The soil surface is extremely soft and I should be able to plant by just dragging in the seed. This is what my soil surface is like……..sorta like potting soil. It’s on the verge of getting a little dry on me now though….at least at surface levels anyways.



If we pull back the hay you can see that we’ve basically just got a mini-mulch pile across the surface of the field. You can germinate cereal grains, clovers, and brassicas very easily in a seed bed like this.

The most challenging time period by far for most folks who want to use a T&M method will be in the very beginning. That mulch bed you see on my soil surface is a big key to why I’m able to sprout seed efficiently this way. If you’ve been tilling for years and decide that you want to try to plant using a method like this….then you won’t have that mulch bed to work will at first. That has to be realized and it needs to be a main focus of your initial goals. This is NOT something that you can just decide to try one year and expect to have the same success.

I have researched T & M an awful lot this past year. I have a food plot that is so rocky that I have to double my seed just to get s decent stand. I have adjusted the PH with lime and planed browntop for quick biomass. I cut browntop two weeks ago and am hoping the grass will thicken up enough that I won't have to disc this year. Does it seem that I am taking the right approach or do I need to try to remove rock first? This ground is hard and has an awful lot of gravel and sandstone in it. Any advice would be appreciated.

This is exactly how my soil is. It's loaded down with rocks and chert. I'm starting this method this year. It has brown top on it now. Cereal Rye and clover up next. Lots of clover in the woods plots. I may have to cut a few more trees to get more light in. No way this soil is getting tilled and especially not sub soiled. That would bring up the devil in it.