Y'all sure are a stubborn bunch.......

I hunt a place in the MS delta outside yazoo city. When it dries up there will be cracks in the soil a inch or two wide and 6 inches deep. Its crazy looking.

When wet... Notice the tracks are not visible on loader.

Damn, y'all sure got a knack for getting things stuck around here!!

Is this a thread about growing weeds or mowing weeds or something? I look at the photos for the last few pages and it just looked like weeds growing, and being mowed.

Am I missing something?

To start with I think you should take a look at the definition of a "weed"..........


"A weed is a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation, "a plant in the wrong place."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weed


None of these plants are "weeds"....... They're not unwanted nor are they in the wrong place. They're native plants doing exactly what they were designed to do. The thread is revolving around that idea and the idea of using them to work for us as a means of improving the soil as well as ways of manipulating their succession. Mowing is a tool and there are numerous ways of using it to effect plant succession and composition depending on your frequency and timing.

Here’s another thing that I’m showing and some of what we’ve been talking about in the last page or so……. I’ve got naturally sandy soil that is just about as chitty as you can get…….Here it is years ago. It would damn near pour through an hourglass probably…..



What I’m showing is why my fall plots look and produce a lot different now than many that are grown in the same soil that are sparse and struggling to even germinate and grow……... It all revolves around increasing soil organic matter. What you are calling "weeds"......I call my summer cover crop.

When we talk about organic matter and biomass, etc…….Most people are likely picturing dead wheat straw (hay) but probably not much more past that point. The true end goal though is the end product of humus produced from that biomass....like in the picture below of highly organic soil where the soil microbes have formed the humus into “soil aggregates”…..Soil aggregates are what give soil structure and allows things like proper water infiltration and soil aeration to take place….This is from my property with the same crappy soil……It just formed from a different source of decomposing organic matter over time……Same concepts though and something that should even turn on a lightbulb as to why you need to include some woodier types of biomass in your food plot rotation over time. Sunn hemp for example…..dog fennel…..blackberry…..milo……It’s a different type of carbon source than a fine grass provides.


https://www.ndsu.edu/soilhealth/soil-health/soil-property-1/aggregation/

Aggregation – Arrangement of primary soil particles (sand, silt, clay) around soil organic matter and through particle associations. Aggregate stability is a good indicator of soil health.

Ok. You didnt have to get all fancy. You could have just said " Yes. I am growing weeds, but I LIKE weeds."

See, where we plant we hate weeds and try to kill them believe it or not. Crazy , I know. I guess we just aren't right.

But I will follow along and take notes so if I ever want to get a great stand of weeds established and growing well I can get some tips.

Great job though by the way. Those are definitely some of the NICEST weeds I have ever seen!

You haven't missed anything.

So let me get this straight so I understand y’alls way of thinking…..Y’all are saying that everything in this pic is just worthless weeds that need to be gotten rid of?? Correct??

No, what I am saying is that whole area would be bush hogged, limed , fertilized , planted and growing Durana clover if it was on my land . And 10 to 20 deer an evening would be in there eating high protein forage.

I try to grow great high protein forage on every available acre to attract and hold deer on my properties. I try to create destination plots, where deer travel to get and spend a lot of time in feeding. I try to maintain Durana clover fields year round for destination fields so deer and turkey go there all year long, not just during the hunting seasons. So to me weeds are meant to be killed.

I am sure there are some palatable weeds there but they certainly are not going to pull in deer and hold them in the area like highly desirable, palatable and protein rich forage does.

I guess my strategy is different. But then again as stated, I hate weeds.

I see atleast 7 or 8 different things right there i have seen deer eat before. Its just not pretty. Dont fit most peoples idea of what deer feed should be. I have seen deer walk all the way across a beautiful green field to eat blackberry leaves, greenbriar, or privet. Deer can be pretty offensive. Its almost like they have absolutely no appreciation for a mans hard work. I guess most deer would make it just fine without us there to feed them. Theyd just eat the stuff in your pictures. Youve got to admit though, per square foot, theres more nutrition in most nice looking food plots. Should be anyhow, just because theres not all that clutter that the deer just dont eat.

I hate dog fennel as much as I hate fireants and yellow jackets, it has absolutely no redeeming qualities as far as I'm concerned

If I could air lift a mature crop of corn, peas, sunflowers, etc into my fields then that’s kinda the picture I get that you’re basing your statement off of…..or even a lush stand of clover……However, the problem is that I can’t air lift it into place….it has to be grown…..And the combination of high deer density and low productivity sandy soil wont allow that to happen without scaling up the operation to fields that are 10-20 acres or more and adding high amounts of inputs……So in reality, no…. a field of those kinds of plants would not produce "more" in this situation…..As a matter of fact it would cause the productivity of the area to go backwards when the deer quickly wipe it out and no biomass was produced to recycle back to the soil.....or I was trying to grow all clover (N) with no carbon. These concepts play out in all soils but your more fragile ones are the ones that really show the effects the most. Take organic matter out of sand and it takes a nose dive in productivity…….Look at the scraggly Egytian Wheat screen in my old pic…….The last pic I just showed is one the most fertile and diverse spots I have with probably 25-30+ different species of plants growing very productively in that one area……It’s got a high organic matter content to the soil….However, start taking away the SOM and it’ll revert back to sand and crabgrass and that diversity will disappear……How you manage the plant communities makes a difference as soil organic matter does not stay static over time....Keep in mind that my main goal is to grow very productive fall plots of cereals and clovers…..So my main summer objective is to protect and improve the sandy soil……..

Dog fennel is one of my favorite plants.......It makes the best screening of anything I've seen. As a matter of fact, my screens and buffers from last year are still standing now while the new ones are growing....A nice mix of dog fennel in a summer stand allows you the ability to go in and "carve out" a plot of whatever shape you want it to be with whatever types of visual screens and dividers you might want to include into it......Let's say you want to take a larger plot and divide in half or quarters or you wanted to leave a perimeter buffer all the way around it. For example, in the pic above my bigger field is actually on the backside of that dog fennel screen......The strip I'm showing in the pic is the lane where the buck makes his mistake when the does disappear into the field........

Kinda like so……….Perspective fellas.....perspective....

So dog fennel has zero redeeming qualities and I should just mow it all down this afternoon???........Mow down the whole mouse trap???......Why?

I don't care what you do with your dog fennel or your beloved weeds, you can cultivate and fertilize it, makes no difference to me. It's ugly, nothing eats it and it spreads. You can have mine if you want it. If I see dog fennel and I'm mowing, it's going down. I like pretty fields and pastures, I just can't help it

Back to why “protecting the soil” should be an important objective……This is a spot where I believe my bushhog tire didn’t swivel or something and it scraped the thatch off the top of a small area……It’s on a slight slope with the downhill side being the bottom left of the pic…….



You can literally see the lighter particles of humus (or decomposed organic matter) being separated from the sand and taken downhill by the rain…..Now this is where that “ocean effect” comes into play……This is a small area thas has been effected surrounded by acres of well protected soil…..So it becomes like a scratch on your arm that recovers fairly quickly……However, what if the whole field were currently doing this and ALL of my organic matter was washing away downhill?? Then it would be like a hemorrhaging artery bleeding out……..This is one of the ways in which OM is lost and fields end up being nothing but sand. This should be heavily taken into consideration with how you decide to manage and its one of the big reasons why I do what I do during the summer months….One other thing to note, if you look close I’m pretty sure a few of those larger “rocks” in the top right are pieces of lime I added a number of years ago now.