When in Drought, Wait it Out!

Seeds cannot germinate without moisture, so when you have drought in your area that might be cause for concern with Fall planted plots. I am old enough that I have experienced some pretty major droughts when it came time to plant fall food plots. Rainfall naturally dwindles in the Fall in most areas, but this year seems especially dry across a vast part of the whitetail’s range.  Here is a map of the current areas experiencing dry conditions:

With soil being so dry, even drilling plots will only have marginal success, as the moisture is stuck much deeper in the dirt than seeds can utilize. So, what should you do? Wait! It may seem like it’s too late to get anything to grow, but we have a trick up our sleeves that can take you to the promised land in terms of lush green fields: Amazin’ Grains! The secret part of this blend is that it can germinate with soil temps a lot colder than a lot of other food plot plants. 

Here is a real-world example of what I mean when I say that Amazin’ Grains can be planted VERY late in the growing season. Back in 2023, we experienced a drought throughout much of the country that Fall. As an experiment, I planted Amazin’ Grains on October 7th, roughly one month AFTER the optimal timeframe which would have been around Labor Day for our area. Ideally, four weeks before average first frost you would sow Amazin’ Grains right ahead of a good soaking rain. The only problem? No rain in sight by the time we had our plots prepped. So instead of leaving the field fallow, I decided to spread seeds ahead of a good rain which happened to fall a few days after we had our first frost of the year.  

Our average first frost here in Minnesota is September 28th so it was a week later than that. I didn’t think much would come of the seed I spread, and I thought the birds would get most of it. To my surprise, 10 days later I had a green patch of life where it was just recently a desert. Even with soil temps in the 40s we still were able to grow something! No, it wasn’t the prettiest plot on our test site, but it grew! Here is what it looked like:

So the take home message here is that if you are in the middle of a drought like most of the USA, get your Amazin’ Grains and be ready to put it out right before the next good rain. Your deer will thank you for it!