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I’m getting a lot of questions recently about what to plant at the tail end of the spring planting window. Let me take you on a journey of my own experience planting soybeans in Minnesota on June 21st a few years ago. I had been extremely busy and had gotten behind on prepping this new food plot. It was an overgrown pasture and needed a lot of cleaning up.
I and some buddies put a lot of sweat into clearing brush, removing stumps, and killing off the brome grass as well as goldenrod this field had become. We were finally able to get the field ready but it felt late. Our steps were: cut down bigger trees/brush; spray field with round-up; wait 1 week, roto till fire-break around entire field perimeter; burn the dying vegetation; rototill the entire plot; drill soybeans at 50 lbs/acre 1 inch deep.
Farmers crops were already well-established and ours was still bare dirt.
This ended up working in our favor, however, because that late-planted bean field didn’t get wiped out by deer in the early growth stages. Most deer had established summer ranges next to the farther-along crop fields. This field was a little over 2 acres and was completely surrounded by woods and great deer cover.
With only 2.3 acres of soybeans, we were concerned that summer deer browse would limit growth, but here is what the field looked like on August 18th.
I bounced around a lot that year, targeting mature deer with my bow. I was able to catch up to one of my hit listers I named “Skywalker”, which allowed me to pass up two studs when I hunted this beanfield with a muzzleloader in December.
Here was a unique screenshot of the late-season video where a nice young stud walks right by one of our blinds.
The moral of this blog is that it’s not too late to plant soybeans. From the example above we planted June 21st and still had huntable beans in the bitter Minnesota late-season. Soybeans have the ability to sense that they don’t have as much time in the growing season compared to if they were planted earlier in the spring, and they will grow faster to catch up with their early-seeded counterparts.
Even better news, we are having a SALE on our Pro Bean Blend which is a blend of 5 different soybean varieties that mature at different stages, always keeping deer interested in your plot. This blend is Glyphosate tolerant and is a great warm-season plot option. You can even use it to clean up some weedy fields prior to fall seeding things like Pro Brassica Blend or The Perfect 10.
