Just like with plants of any sort, weeds can be grouped by their behavior and growth patterns.  There are annuals, biennials, and perennials.

Annuals are the most common weed found in your deer food plots . These weeds have the following characteristics.

a.       Lots of dormant seed

b.      Grow fast

c.       Produce high numbers of seed

d.      Can be both winter or summer

Summer annual weeds germinate in spring or summer while winter annual weeds will germinate in late summer or fall. The summer annuals will die before winter, remain dormant  in soil for the winter or in some cases for years before emerging again. The winter annual weeds overwinter in their vegetative form then in spring or early summer they flower, set seed and mature  and die with seeds dormant in summer months. 

Annual weeds are the biggest concern in fall seeded crops (ex winter wheat and alfalfa) which go through winter dormant period.

The Biennial weed life cycle lasts two years. In the first year the plant forms basal leaves(rosette) and a tap root. In the second year the flower comes, matures and dies. 

perennial weeds are those that  live 2 or more years. What makes them difficult to control is their  re-sprouting roots, rhizomes, stolons, tubers, and plant fragments which can all result in regrowth.  

The perennial weeds are spread by two routes: simple or creeping. With simple there is re-sprouting from crown buds on tap root and spreed from seed. In this case the roots are fleshy, may be large (dandelion). Creeping weeds reproduce by creeping roots(canadian thistle, field bindweed), or above ground stems (runners or stolons) (bentgrass, bermudagrass) or below ground stems(rhizomes)(quackgrass, johnson grass). These also reproduce by seed. 

Some of the more common weeds that spread by simple means are: dandelion, curly dock, buckhorn plantain, broadleaf plantain, poke weed.

The common weeds that are spread by creeping include leafy spurge, field bindweed, canadian thistle, mouseear chickweed, ground ivy, bermudagrass, johnson grass, quackgrass, and yellow nutsedge.

My recommendation on controlling these weeds: Do not let the seedlings get established. Once they have established the perennial weeds are the most difficult group to control. If this occurs you will spend a lot of time dealing with these weeds and it may require cultivation repeated, herbicide, and mowing.

A lot of us are looking for low maintenance food plots. As such, we may inadvertently contribute to the weed problem. If we neglect proper mowing, judicious use of chemicals, get involved in excessive tillage, or till improperly we may be making the problem worse.

In the next segment we will talk about different methods of weed control available for your deer food plots.

In this video we go out to do a spring assessment on a clover paddock that has been in production for a few years and develop a plan to deal with a segment that is not doing well.

Feel free to swing by to our clover paddock and see what you think and follow along while we continue with our plan to rejuvenate the plot in this series.

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for more information on planting your food plots. We can make the process easier for you.

For those of you also interested in small game and turkey food plots, the good news is, there is overlap and you can achieve results for small game hunting with your whitetail food plot.

Feel Free to visit our website to download Chapter One for FREE. Let us know what you think.

http://www.diydeerfoodplots.com/

http://deerdevelopment.com/index.php

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for a free Chapter Download of deer food Plots Made Easy.

The effect of weeds can be significant and if I was to have one priority in getting a productive food plot it would be dealing properly with the weeds. Assuming you have a good location for your food plot and you have picked a plant combination that works in your soil type, then loss in yields are often due to poor weed efforts.

Effects of Weeds in deer food Plots:

Competition for nutrients, light and water

Chemical impact some weed have on other plants

Competition decreases yields of prefered plants

Can alter palatability and deer can avoid the plot because weeds make it bitter

Steps to dealing with weeds

1. Prevent them form establishing

                Control prior to seed set: We spend a lot of time pretreating and tilling the land in combination with controlled burning(if it can be done safely) to get the best weed control possible before planting.

2. Don’t bring them in

               This is often overlooked. Consider how weeds are spread: wind, water, animals,  human movement, equipment, etc.  Don’t use contaminated seed (use only plant certified crop seed) which means it is certified to be free of weeds.  Use clean equipment,  don’t drag vegetative parts of perennial weeds around as it spreads weeds.

3. Understand the enviroment

     Different enviroments promote different weeds. Tilled row crops discourage perennials and encourage annuals. Established perennial crops like alfalfa may out compete annual weeds but perennials may get going because of lack of tillage.

Stay tuned for next in the series. I will discuss annual, biennial and perennial weeds that are likely a concern in your whitetail food plot.

If you are interested in getting started with a food plot, but aren’t sure where to start: download the first chapter in my ebook “deer food Plots Made Easy” and read all about food plot Design Strategies.

http://www.diydeerfoodplots.com/index.html

If you are looking for more detailed information on specific weed control, I have found this website is helpful. It is Washington State University Extension. Check in the agriculture section under plants, then weed control. There are specific publications that may be helpful to you and online courses in weed identification also:)

http://extprograms.wsu.edu/agriculture/plants/weed/Pages/default.aspx

It makes for excellent escape and bedding cover - Native grass stands like switchgrass, or plantings with more diversity, big bluestem, indiangrass etc, are excellent ideas for land managers improving wildlife cover for deer habitat. But I would use these types of plantings as stand alone habitat improvement projects - the larger the better.

I could see where these strips of switchgrass and brush, evergreens could break up a paddock enough to create a situation where a buck would need to investigate things a bit more. I can also see it on a site where it’s a large open area where these strips would add more diversity, edge and cover. But most paddocks sites, acre or so in size - I don’t see much value to it.  Large sites, yeah I can see it, but the plantings of switch
and trees would be more of a habitat improvement plan than a “hunting” thing. 

A person could structure the strips to converge at a tree stand area, as when they do become established they will create travel lanes.  I don’t see ten or twenty foot wide strips doing it though - more like 50′ plus. 

Also, you would want to plan a tall variety of switchgrass - there are several different varieties out there.    It may take, and usually does take three years for it to establish.These warm season grasses need good sun to soil contact for the grasses to come and they grow well from late June through August.  

Some people have recommended clover with it. However, I would not plant anything with it.    clover would already be up and would shade the ground and would certainly set-back growth of your switchgrass.   

If you manage your food plots well ie mowing, spraying and tillage I don’t see the switchgrass spreading much - so that wouldn’t concern me.  I do see a place for it if you have a large food plot area.  The best place for this type of an approach would be a larger area where dedicating both food plots and additional cover interspressed together. 

Say you have a fallow field of twenty acres or so, here you would really only need about five acres of food plot - which can be a lot to manage depending upon the equipment you have.  If you created cover areas, with native grass, evergreens and shrubs and spread the paddocks out in the area it would add a lot of diversity, edge and habitat. 

Trees, shrubs do take quite awhile to estiblish, as you well know, and the switchgrass, native grass planting does come much faster and is some really nice cover.  I really don’t see a 10 foot wide strip of swithcgrass creating much cover, or something deer would really use all that much.  The thing is though - there are sites where creating a corridor of grass cover may really help “dictate” deer travel.

So I can see some value to it depending on the site - sites would have to be large enough where the site demands both both food plot and habitat improvement “cover” together.   Most food plots are small, and if they are too big to cover from one stand, you likely would want different stand locations at the food plot anyway to address varying wind directions.

Native grass - switchgrass can be an awesome habitat improvement tool - I just don’t see small narrow strips of grass really doing much.  Now, a strip of natives, say fifty feet wide or so with some evergreens planted with it…. You may have something there!

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