The Most Important Step In Creating Any Food Plot
Always Get A Soil Sample First!
The cost of a soil sample is very cheap compared to the cost of a failed food plot. Soil test price can range from 10-30 dollars depending on who you send it to. Most food plots fail because you did not spend the time to get it tested. Most soil i have tested in the north east ranges from about 4.8 to about a 5.2 in areas that have never been tested. Food plots in the woods typically are a littler lower then say in a open field.
Food plots can be a great way to attract wildlife to an area and also provide a year round food source depending in what part of the country you are in. Deer naturally eat green and growing plants known as natural browse on a daily basis as long as its available. Some states have a longer growing season then others. If you are in the north east like i am most natural browse is gone around the end of October. You can create spring and summer plots as well and fall and winter plots or just do fall and winter and rely on natural browse for the spring and summer. Only you know your land and can make that decision. You have to know the amount of deer you have compared to the amount of food available.
Back to liming. Liming food plots can be done in a few ways. The easiest way is pelletized lime that can be bought in bags or in bulk. Its easy to spread and is Fast acting and in some cases you can cut down on the amount by half (sometimes). Recently i leased 118 acres in PA that has potential (in my eyes). It already had a 3 acre field that has never had anything done to it and the field just needed cleaning up some. This field will be a feeding plot for year round food and not just a kill plot. I had the soil tested and it came back at around a 5.0. This past weekend myself and a friend spread 3,000 pounds in less then 2 hours.
All we had to use was a 100 pound atv spreader and some manual labor. We put together a plan and got it all done fairly quickly and had fun in the process. We will be doing the same thing this weekend as well. The standard is 1 ton of lime per acre to raise the PH 1 point. Of course you can only buy as much as your pocket will allow you to. Just know without getting that soil tested and fixing the PH you will most likely have a failed plot and wasted money on seed and NPK.
Good luck see you next time!
Additional sources to check out
Subscribe to our youtube channel to follow along on the progress
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtO22JGxUrHX14SwAGdr9og?view_as=subscriber
check out https://www.antlergrow.com/