Vet Judy

            Deer food plot planters are well aware that the best food plots are those that are well planned.  In this fall season, I want to take a look at the flexibility that a fall-seeded small grain like wheat may give you next spring.

As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, wheat can be a most valuable deer food plot crop for winter and fall forage, especially in larger plantings.  But it’s time to review another advantage to winter wheat plantings beyond the food value: as preparation for planting spring legumes.

You have a couple options with the 60-120 pounds of wheat that you seed per acre in a fall planting.  It may be utilized for winter forage, and then fertilized in February to provide standing grain cover and habitat the following summer.  Larger wheat plantings, of course, can also be harvested for their grain value.

But wheat seedings in food plots may be most valuable for the flexibility that they give for frost seeded legumes in the early spring.  You can overseed clover or lespedeza into a wheat planting and provide valuable legume forage in the early spring and summer months.  Other legumes may be appropriate for seeding into a wheat stand depending on your location.

            Wheat (Triticum aestivum) is a cool-season annual grass.  In the Midwestern U.S., it is usually seeded in the fall for early to mid-summer grain production.  As you move further north, it is more common to find wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the late summer or early fall.

            Wheat’s coldhardiness makes it a great choice for fall deer food plot plantings.  It is also a fairly easy crop to seed in large fields to improve the forage options during the early spring.  To improve your wheat stand, consider adding about 75 pounds of urea or ammonium nitrate per acre in the early spring.

            But wheat probably performs best as part of a food plots rotation in larger fields.  It may be seeded in the fall for fall and winter forage; then red or ladino clover can be “frost seeded” into the wheat field in the late winter or early spring.  The natural freezing and thawing of the ground works the clover seed into the ground.  The wheat may then be harvested for grain or straw, and the clover will be established in the field for summer forage.

            Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) should not be confused with wheat.  Its purpose in a deer plot planting is to provide a green forage and cover in the early season, along with grain in the fall.  You’ll find a variety of opinions on the use of buckwheat in deer food plots.  I’m not persuaded that deer will choose buckwheat over other plants in our setting, but this may be due to my northern location.

 For more annual deer plot forage choices check out the article:  http://www.diydeerfoodplots.com/articles/annual-forages.html