Nothing.

Dog fennel loves nitrogen. I had it bad in my clover plots in Jacksonville. Love it for a screen, but hate it in my plots. Don't mind other weeds.

There again, y’all keep getting butt hurt over suggestions and questions. Since dog fennel is so beneficial, why haven’t you planted it in your other fields? Nobody is hating on a process that nature has been doing for years. Saying so is what’s ridiculous. It only makes sense to take the non beneficial plants out and replace them with beneficial plants to speed the process along. From experience, we can speed these type things up and be beneficial at the same time.

Read Aldo Leopold’s quote again…..Do you disagree with idea he’s putting forth in that quote?

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

--- Aldo Leopold



I happen to agree with it myself to an extent……There is no such thing as a bad plant (again to an extent)…..There is no such thing as a non-beneficial plant…..Every plant that’s here has a function and serves a purpose of some kind. It actually does something other just stand there and look green. I’m suggesting that one of our biggest issues is that we simply write off most plants as a “weed” when we really don’t even understand them. How much thought have you ever actually given to what something like dog fennel was actually put on this earth to do? …..

One of these places we differ in opinion is I’m not just looking at every single plant for deer food. About 75-80% of the plants that grow in my field and on my property in general….will be browsed by deer. There’s plenty of summer food so I don’t stress about trying to eliminate that other 20%....Its just added cost and hassle that gives a very poor return on my investement compared to what I’m getting at a free cost right now......I leave that 20% and let it preform the function that it was put here to do….whatever that may be….there’s a lot of other roles to be played in this cycle other than produce deer food. There are some plants that I believe replenish the soil but are intentionally made to not be liked as food. That ensures that there’s a certain amount of biomass grown to feed back to the soil…..And that’s why I don’t mind dog fennel…..It bringing back a high c:n ratio type of biomass that I’m not getting from any other plant. It’s almost a “woody” plant. This effects the quality of my end humus product and it also effects bacterial composition. I believe this type of biomass brings in more of fungal community to balance with the bacteria if I remember correctly. I also recognize that there’s probably a lot about dog fennel…..and many other plants we call weeds….. that I don’t understand. The only way to learn where it fits in the natural system though is to study it…..That’s hard to do if you get rid of it.

Let’s just say for instance that having a little dog fennel in the fields during the summer returned all the P to the soil we’ll ever need to grow winter grains. It just completely eliminated the need to ever buy any phosphorus again……Would it then be a beneficial plant?......That's just a made up hypothetical example to make a point...... but all of these plants are preforming some type of function like that. We might just not understand what it is yet because we haven't really even looked and given it any thought. This is how nature was designed to be self-sufficient and regenerate highly productive prairie ecosystem for eons….year after year without input from humans. Why just discard all of the free plants without even understanding their true value?

Blumsden…….Where else do we get this type of woody biomass in our fields for free…….high c:n ratio plants……Can you think of one any more woody than this? There’s not many natural field species like that…..



Now, I’m not saying it needs to be a monoculture of it or anything either…..I’m just saying that its definitely returning some benefits to us. If you walk into some nice hardwoods and turn over the leaves…..Why is that dirt so rich and smells so good? What type of biomass is feeding that soil? Woody matter like stems and leaves right? What I’m getting at is….. its the woody biomass that’s gonna give us a different kind of richness in our soil that we can’t obtain simply from grasses. Well….here it is for free sucking up any excess N and making concentrated carbon for me.




Also…..from another standpoint….. if this is situation that’s possible for folks….it gives you an instant understory and something you can design around……




….like trails for you to sneak to your stand on…..…….or maybe trails leading the deer by your shooting lane…..and maybe its part of the larger design……,,,,dog fennel doesn’t get its fair shake…..to call it non-beneficial is selling it way short.

I never said that it wasn't beneficial, I just don't like it in my plots, around it is fine. That stuff can get really tall, and yes really woody to a point that it might turn a bullet just enough to make a great shot, a marginal shot, or an arrow.

I’m not really growing dog fennel “around” my plots anymore…….I’m more carving a design in it and the other summer vegetation now. One of the reasons I accept it so easily is that I watched the change in deer activity over the last couple years as I left some of the field grown up instead of bushhoggin and planting it all. I used to have all my orchards as well as this whole field mowed and sowed during the winter….One year I even went from 3 acres to 8 acres of planted grains thinking that would mean more deer. It didn’t though and I had a lot of wasted space that year. After I let it grow up the deer activity sky rocketed on my property. The deer just didn’t just live on the neighbors and come to my field to eat anymore…..they “lived” on my property now…….The messy plot is in the very back… That’s the crimson clover in the front.....and understory cover everywhere in between. Yep, it's thickkkkk…..

If you find dog fennel so beneficial and you grasped some hypothetical numbers that it's producing for you, then why aren't you planting it in your plots? Try as you may, you can't make dog fennel a better option in a foodplot than something that would be beneficial to a foodplot. I don't know why that's so hard for you to understand.

I’m not planting any of it…..I didn’t plant the crabgrass that started the rebuilding process and I didn’t plant the dog fennel that continues it….I’m letting nature choose during the summer months and grow it for me………and then I’m choosing what to grow during the winter. I think nature will grow what the conditions says it needs….Just the way it did in the beginning when my soil was completely depleted of carbon and it brought in a plant like crabgrass as step 1…..I’m not at step one anymore though…..I’m at step 4 or 5 and apparently my soil is ready for some woody biomass now to continue the process. I don’t see another plant that I’d want to bring in that I think would do any better overall that what the dog fennel is doing. It’s free, very woody, and very drought tolerant to boot. It should break down and make for some really rich soil eventually. I’m good with it coming into any field I maintain.

I think I may be causing the dog fennel to grow in a little bit of overabundance though due to excess nitrogen. I’m ok with that right now for this rotation because that boo-boo probably just produced me a nice crop of high end carbon that’s about to get recycled…..I’ll ease back on the N and see if I can change the dog fennel composition by changing the growing condition to keep it more balanced in the future and not shading out the other vegetation growing along side of it.....the "summer deer food" plants

Just further explaining the general concept I’m talking about……..Think about this question……If we were to cut down a pine stand tomorrow down to a clean clearcut……….what’s gonna happen to that piece of ground over the next 100 years? Take me through that process like we were looking at it in 10 years….again in 20 years …..then 50 years……and so forth….What will take place?......

It’ll start out as the early successional species with forbs, legumes, and grasses sprouting from the seed bank……..In 5-10 years you’ll start to see the stand transition into sweetgum saplings, thick briars…that type of “trash” stand as most people would refer to it…….Eventually in 20-50 years those sweetgums would start to die out though and give way to oaks that have been sitting in waiting and the forest would end up being a climax community of likely oak, beech, hickory….specific species will depend on geographic location.

Now that’s a brief, brief explanation of the process and I'm sure my years are a little off but the bigger point I’m trying to make is how that there’s a progression happening and a step by step order of things……And so is there in our food plots……...there’s a step by step order occurring….but its not quite the exact same as the clear cut though because in most situations we’ve basically taken the soil and broke it down with tillage to nothing but dirt. We’re actually working through a process of soil rebuilding……Nature still has a progressive process just the same and species for accomplishing certain tasks. N2Turkey keep talking about replacing them with “better” species but why do we assume that we know a better species than nature? If we put that “weed” side by side with the plant that n2turkey wants to replace them with….Which one is likely gonna out compete the other one? Which one is likely gonna make it through a drought?....etc..etc.....Which one is better for rebuilding soil? Your way or God's way? Now that may sound WAAAY deep for some of you.....but isn't that what nature's way really boils down to....isn't it God's design? Just something to ponder over......

I see dog fennel as just another step in the line of progressing……Progressing to richer and more productive soil. I’ll always tweak things to keep it in early successional growth and not allow it to progress to a forest…..But I still will seek to reach some kind of a climax soil condition. I know I’m not there yet but I think the new addition of all of this long term, high C:N biomass is gonna take it to the next level. I’ve seen what happens when you grow blackberries in the same spot year after year and mow that biomass down. The soil gets a whole nuther kind of rich in that spot. That’s what I’m going for across the whole field…

I’m on my second year of T&M on my Florida lease and it will be my last. 2 years in a row and I have had terrible plots. Last year I sprayed, let it die, sewed, bush hogged. This year I tried spraying and not spraying they all look terrible.

I planted the same seed in my Alabama lease using the tiller and cultipacker method and they look great.

I gave it a shot 2 years and it doesn’t work for me for some reason. We do have extremely sandy soil

So do you bush hog in the spring with your dog fennel areas?

When you plant a garden, do you put the seed in the ground and walk away from it, allowing the weeds to take over or do you tend to it?

I’m not growing a garden…..I’m rotating between a natural food plot in the summer and cereal grains in the winter…..

It’s most likely due to some variable that’s not right about your situation and you’re not recognizing what needs tweaking. It’s probably not the “method”….it's the lack of understanding what to look for with a new way that you’ve never done before. This is not a one size fits all approach….no offense meant......Its about understanding the concepts though and then tweaking things as needed to fit your situation. Everybody can’t just cookie cutter off what someone else is doing. You’re dealing with your own totally unique situation. You have to be able to assess what needs working on with your fields to get them in the right conditions to work. You can't always expect to be able to transition in one year and have great success right out of the gate when you've got to fix the conditions that have resulted from the things you've been doing to it for years or even decades with tillage practices. How much biomass are you producing in the summer that your’re making into a thatch layer for fall planting?

You're not growing pines either, yet you tried to do some flawed analogy with it. So, back to the garden question, what do you do with your garden?

I did two years ago in the late winter and the same plants came back a little taller the next year. I skipped last year and didn't do anything to see what would happen. Everything came back about the same without mowing. Now I have found that mowing during summer months after dog fennel has jumped to around chest high will help thin it and allow other plants to move in. This is about when spring is turning to summer and plants are really jumping. You could mow it a second time and really help other plants if you just clipped the dog fennel and didn't clip the other plants below. You're basically just stunting the fennel and setting it back while the other plants grow full steam ahead. This is how I plan on keeping it balanced for now. I'll probably clip it next year in May or June and then let it grow back up for winter if it comes back any thicker next year....it should just thin it out some and keep my other diversity growing with it.

The concept of nature taking a progressive approach and moving from a pioneer condition to a climax condition are one in the same whether it be forests or soil….both progress through stages....that is not a flawed analogy. I like how you never provide any explanation for your criticism. Care to elaborate any?...Maybe with something a little deeper than two sentences and another question?

Something else to add to my other answer on this question……I don’t think I’ll mow the dog fennel after deer season this year either but instead, I may pull a drag across it just to put that old dead fennel to the ground. Mowing the old dead stuff would be like trying to mow small tree saplings. They would lay over just fine though if you pulled something over them. Might just do it with my bucket again...That way mowing the new green growth in May or June wouldn’t be any kind of thing….it’d just be like mowing grass. It would also take down all of the old overstory going into a new growing season. I think from a long term soil building perspective it would be good just to lay the dog fennel over whole anyways.

Harold, I would think the deer would bed all out in that stuff. No need to move far away when there's bedding and food in the same place. An overgrown pasture is a deer haven. We used to be able to hunt one and we saw deer non stop all day long. Killed several good ones out of it.