We have put in a quarter acre food plot for the wildlife and,with the rain we just got,everything just popped up. I'm really excited.Yep, things like that excite me.

This time we used broom corn(sorghum) soybeans,buckwheat and sunflowers.The soybeans probably won't make it past the deer,but what the hay. Seed cost was abt.$15. Food plot is mostly for the quail,turkey,doves and other birds.

Turns out the soil there is pretty good.I'm thinking I may make it a third garden area.Now that's a good plan,isn't it? Draw in the wildlife and then plant a garden. Oh,well.

I need garden areas seperated for growing and isolating all my different seeds.Easier than trying to bag flowers to keep from cross pollination,and works better than trying to time it.Last year,I tried timing it and I ended up having to cut off tassles of the one corn so it wouldn't cross with one I was saving.That was a bother.

Anyway,in the fall we'll put in the winter cover crop,then decide from there.

I also (well,Nick mostly) got 600 feet of native grass transplants in the ground.Yippee! This is going to be my seed source for making my native praire. At the rate I'm currently going,I calculated that it will only take me 160 years to convert my pastures from fescue to native warm season grasses.Either I need to pick up the pace a bit or figure out what herbs Methuselah used.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Answers

I just put in a quarter acre food plot for the wildlife, too. I call it a vegetable garden.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

great one Sam....LOL.....we just did also.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Witty,Sam,witty...smoke 'em while you got 'em. ;o) You had to be there.Maybe a few extra deer hanging around the place,eh? Well,after you are done fattening them up,eat them!

See, the idea is to lure them AWAY from the garden.Not that it works... they'll just stop for supper one place and dessert the other.But that's the idea,anyway.

I use fencing.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

When we were putting up an 8' high fence all around the yard, people kept asking me what we were getting -- llamas? etc. I had to tell them it was to keep the livestock OUT, not IN. And it worked pretty well until some dope (not me) left the gate open and let the deer in, then locked them in. They had all-you-can-eat salad bar, and plenty of water from the rain barrels. I really felt like I deserved some nice venison after that.

Seriously however, have you observed something that the mourning doves particularly like? I'd like to encourage them. I've got ruffed grouse that come into the yard for the white clover, and I'm busily planting up multi-purpose trees/shrubs for the birds as well (shadblow, cornelian cherries, currants, etc. The robins sure love the crab apples.) but I'd like to attract the little mourning doves, I just love them.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

Julie, mourning doves require some open country (they won't hang out in a clearing in the woods), and I think there's nothing they love better than sunflowers. When I was a kid, we had a field that grew up in wild sunflowers when it was fallow. Flocks of doves moved in when the seeds were ripe. I love to listen to their call.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

Julie, we have white pine that they nest in and they like the sunflowers here.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

Yep,what Sam said.

Weeping like a willow ..and mourning like a dove.

I love them too.Can't see hunting them,for what little you get,although I'm told it's tasty.I don't allow them to be hunted here on the farm. Not the quails either as we don't have enough yet.Nor the 'house deer' that I identified by markings and named.Must go the the back of the property and hunt the ones that I don't have a personal relationship with.Makes sense,huh.Yeah,sure.Logic doesn't always have to rule your life.

Nor the coyotes unless its when the fur is prime. Ditto coons(one of which had to be relocated yesterday) The strawberry filching ,plant digging, dirty little rat..er...coon.

When people come to hunt,they follow my rules or they don't hunt here no more. I am Steward,hear me yell at you if you mess with my Mother Nature!

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

Well, we've sure got white pines for them to nest in! All they want! (got a bunch in front of the house that are 80 years or so old, my grampa Joe planted them when he built the house) And everyone else is clearing off land while I am planting trees back, so perhaps they will stay around if I give them lots of sunflowers.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

Julie, with all those white pines (and your family history that goes with them) you may want to rethink planting currants. Or anything else in the ribes family, like gooseberries. Ribes bushes are a carrier of white pine blister rust - a disease fatal to white pines. In fact, some states will not allow the planting of any ribes. There is one particular ribes, a black currant, I think, that has been proven to NOT be a carrier, and it is exempt from the restrictions. The only place I can remember seeing it is in the catalog from St. Lawrence Nursery in New York. Sandy

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Jostaberry is NOT a carrier as well.That's why I planted it.Tasty too.I thought so anyway.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Strangely, for some reason, Wisconsin has repealed the ban on currant planting. I thought that I had read something somewhere about it not being as big a deal as they had thought it was...but I can't remember WHAT it was I did read.

In any event, the currants I've been planting are black ones, along with Jostaberries mostly. The gooseberries look like a failure. They have been stripped of leaves every year by some nasty little army- green caterpillar and I don't think they're staging a comeback this year. Those caterpillars are sneaky too. Not only do they blend in with the leaves, they hang on the underside of the leaf and eat from there so you don't notice until voila! one morning the bushes are nude again.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001