Well, I have to apologize if you have checked my blog in the last couple of months and found no updates. I have been pretty busy with work, school, vacation and the family life. Last week I put out 8 trail cameras so I should have some pictures to post in a couple of weeks. Hopefully there will be a couple huge bucks to get excited about. I put some corn down to help the deer find the Trophy Rock in front of the cameras. A friend of mine has placed 2- 25 gallon drums of water by his Trophy Rock and they have been producing a lot of pictures for him in this dry Kansas heat. Unfortunately we lost one of our farms to hunt this summer but there are still 6 for us to hunt.
Kansas had a ton of rain this spring to feed the weeds and then July came with no heat and temperatures over 100 for the majority of the month. I have never seen our creeks dried up before (except for the deeper pools) on our farms. We missed our 3 weeks straight of 100 degree days while we were in Wisconsin (pictures to come). It was 75 up there and hard to come back to the miserable heat. The fields look bad down south for corn but the soybeans seem to be doing okay. They are just a little shorter than usual. The local seed distributors here tell me that a lot of farmers are already starting to combine corn fields (for silage) because the are all dried out. When I checked our corn at the farm last week (to put out cameras) I found them in pretty good shape. Here is what our food plots look like:
Field #1- Corn looks good, except on the west side of the plot. The corn didn't grow well on that side and the weeds choked it out a bit. We are going to plant an annual there this month (probably Biologic Maximum). The coons are hitting this corn pretty hard. Any suggestions to get rid of them? We have traps but we aren't down there enough this time of year. The existing clover that is on the north side of this field looks dormant. We will have to fertilize it and try to get it to come back as the weather cools and we get some rain.
Field #2- This spring we broadcast 2.5 acres of soybeans and planted the rest in corn seed from last year. The corn didn't make it and the weeds choked out the soybeans so we are going to leave the weeds/corn on the perimeter of the field and plant whitetail clover and Maximum in the middle 2.5 acres of it.
Field #3- Deer ate the clover down making room for the current weed patch. I have talked with 2 separate experts from the Whitetail Institute and Mossy Oak Biologic and I am going to have to except the fact that a perinial just won't make it in this field. From now on we will only plant annual plots on field #3. With the current PH, we will be planting Maximum.
Field #4- Corn looks great in the field (except for the far west corner. So we are going to replant the west corner with Wintergreens (Whitetail Institute).
Well, considering our drought this summer I am pleased that most of our corn made it. Actually I saw a corn field a few miles away that had an irrigation system for it and it still looked no better than ours. Unfortunately we have to plant almost half of our 13 acres of food plots thanks to the Kansas weather/summer. Farmers tell me they sprayed their fields 2-3 times this year and still couldn't kill all the weeds. We should have the fields planted by the end of the month with the new annual plots. After that I will start checking the cameras. I am excited about this fall because we should have an abundance of late season food for the deer. Most of the crops should come off early around us pulling the deer in. The Wintergreens and Maximum are late season plots that we chose because we already have clover. We wanted something to hold deer in addition to the corn for late season. It should be good during the rut also.
It is going to take some work and money this month but we could still salvage our fields and make them deer magnets. It will be up to God and the weather.
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