Ani-Logics Outdoors

I’m going through the big D and don’t mean Dallas!  This was once a famous country music line, and this fall it holds true for most food plotters, except the big D stands for DROUGHT!  Across much of the US, we are dealing with a painfully dry forecast with NO rain in sight.  What rain chances we have are short in duration and aren’t high percentage odds.  So, what should you do if you are in the fall planting window with no rain in sight?  My suggestion is to forget about the calendar and wait for the forecast to improve.

It’s no secret that predicting the weather is not an exact science.  There might be a better chance of rain in 3 weeks, so let’s not throw in the towel on planting just yet.  Also, we have a trump card in our pocket, and that is the power of Amazin’ Grains.  Amazin’ Grains is a mixture of Cereal Rye, Forage Oats, Winter Wheat, Triticale, and Winter Peas.  It can be hunt-ready in as little as 2 weeks from the plant date.  So, if your bow opener is mid-September or early October, you still have plenty of time to get a crop growing.

The above paragraph is all fine and dandy if we do catch some timely rain toward the end of the growing season, but many plotters, me included, are wondering, what if it doesn’t rain?  What if you are the unlucky area that has an extended severe drought and there is no rain in the forecast continually for the next month and a half?  Well, here’s an experiment I’m trying with my plots that haven’t been planted, and I’m not going in completely blind here, so hear me out.

My friend Thomas Mlsna of The Untamed Ambition did an interesting experiment last year using cereal rye and turnips soaking seeds in water prior to planting.  Thomas wanted to know germination rates with different lengths of soak.  He found that soaking seeds in water for 6 hours had a better result in terms of germination than soaking seeds for 24 hours.

The pic on the left was the first sign of germination and the pic on the right was 12 days later.  The back right pot was seed-soaked for 6 hours, the front pot was soaked for 24 hours, and the left pot was the control (not soaked).  Photos courtesy of Thomas Mlsna The Untamed Ambition. 

Soaking seeds in water mimics a downpour of rain in which water sits on top of the soil and then seeps in over the course of time.  With too long of a soak, the seeds are stunted and will not grow as well as if given a shorter soak.  This year I will be experimenting with more than just 2 soak intervals to determine the peak interval to have the best results.

The idea here is to get seeds to germinate in very dry soil with nothing other than the moisture we soaked them in.  Will it work?  Yes.  Will it last through the hunting season without moisture?  Probably not.  There will be some value in getting a green carpet across your plot for a short time during the hunting season, and this approach will be better than seeds planted into bone-dry plots without first soaking the seed.  Obviously, if you can irrigate your food plot more power to you, but most of us do not have an easy water source within reach of our plots.    

The good part about using Amazin’ Grains for this is that it doesn’t take long to germinate, so you can try this late into the growing season.  Here in southern Minnesota we typically have our first frost at the end of September or early October, so I have until around September 10^th to wait for natural moisture, then I’m going “full send” on the soak approach.  Obviously the bigger your plot, the bigger the bucket needed to soak seeds.  With Amazin’ Grains, we have bags up to 1 acre in size which is 50 lbs of seed.  The other thing to be careful of is when you broadcast the seed you may not be able to use a cheap plastic seeder.  Soaked seeds are heavy and those little handheld plastic seeders do not have study enough gears to crank with heavy wet seeds.  If the plot is small enough, you can spread it by hand.  Hopefully, you get rain and won’t have to try this last-ditch effort approach, but if you do, let us know how it turns out.  Good luck and happy plotting!