Food Plot Seeds: Blends or Single Species and Why? (Video)

Transcription: 

Talking about planting food plots, if you want to choose a single species of plants versus a combination or a blend of different species together in a plot. What are the reasons? What are the considerations we want to think about when selecting that? Plants definitely respond to different environmental effects at different rates. We’re talking sunlight, moisture, and the shade and also just the timing in the growing season. Every plant is going to respond and mature at different rates. Harshness and different factors that are detrimental to plants, they respond differently to those as well. Having all your eggs in one basket can be an issue if you’re having an excessively dry or wet year, your plot is a little in the shade or too much in the sunlight. Having a blend will certainly hedge your bets and allow you to have more of your bases covered as far as making sure plants can make it through those stress periods of time. The other reason is actual palatability of the deer. Plants develop at different rates and we look at protein levels in the growing part of the tissue of the plant. As those things spike as the plant gets close to it’s maturity of the season, those levels are at different points. If you ever watch deer in a field, they are constantly moving and selecting different plants because each one of those plants they are going after has something they are after. In a monoculture, if everything is maturing at the same time, plants are drying off and the protein levels are dropping you’re kind of stuck in a situation where you’ve only offered one single offering where as a blend can provide multiple opportunities for different maturing dates, different protein levels which translates to selectivity, and palatability to a deer. A great example of that is Pennington’s Feeding Frenzy, which we are a big fan using for fall annual planting (cool season planting). There are cereal grains, Austrians winter peas, annual clover, a lot of different plants that are going to mature at different times offering different points of palatability and peak prime protein levels that is going to keep those deer coming to that plot, selectively feeding throughout the fall part of the season which is, obviously, when we want them there to begin with.

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