How often should you till your plots? I want to plant a clover blend in 3 of my plots but in my main plot I plan on planting late season smorgasboard so it’s not cleaned out before hunting season, well at least thats the plan : )
The reason I’m thinking like this is to reduce the annual work load, I’m just hoping I’m on the right track.
Tom in Blaine
You’re on the right track. The biggest workload reducer is to get good perennial plots established. Then your yearly maintenance is just down to spraying and mowing if you choose.
Attached is a picture of my north plot’s Mega Clover Plus area. This clover stand is 3 years old almost exactly, and it looks terrific. This picture was taken last week just before I mowed.
I’m not a believer in what I call “throw and no-grow”. Results are variable, and yes, some make it work, but to me it looks like 80% of the work for 50% of the results compared to working the soil up properly.
I never till as in roto-tilling, I only use the disc on annual plots. 2 passes with an aggressive, heavy disc is enough to prepare any plot for planting.
I have rock on my property and plenty of it, so a tiller is not an option. But even if I didn’t, I would not roto-till because it takes too long. It’s a very, very slow operation even in good soil. For most food plotters I think the disc is the way to go.
Tillage is probably the toughest operation to find the equipment that works for your property. Too small of equipment and it takes forever and smaller, lighter equipment is easy to over-stress and break, so sizing right is important.
But bigger, heavier equipment while being more effective and time-efficient has downsides as well. Heavy iron can be hard to work on. I just replaced a broken disc on my 8-foot disc and it required some serious wrangling. This would be easy if I had a full shop at the property, but I don’t and most of the food plotters I know are in the same boat.
There isn’t really a magic formula. Just down to finding out what works for you.
You might also find time savings elsewhere. I put a bigger boom on my sprayer and also added a gas-powered water pump so I can fill water faster. Those two additions cut my plot spraying time almost in half on a per acre basis. A tremendous increase in spraying efficiency, which is my most time-consuming plotting operation because it seems like I’m always spraying.
Grouse
Grouse, the picture?
Grouse, where do you pump your water from? Do you have a pond or stream? Curious where you are running your gas pump that you mention. I’m using a pto mounted pump. Could be faster, but fine.
Sorry here’s the picture of one of my Mega Clover Plus plots. This plot is 3 years old.
This plot is extremely lush and thick and has almost no weeds. The only thing I do is spray for grasses as once a year.
This plot will easily last another year making it 4 years old. That’s a lot of tillage saved compared to planting all annuals. I know the hunting TV shows don’t give clover much love, but a good stand of clover is always attractive to deer.
Grouse
IMG_20200619_171713650.jpg
Grouse, where do you pump your water from? Do you have a pond or stream? Curious where you are running your gas pump that you mention. I’m using a pto mounted pump. Could be faster, but fine.
I have a stream on the property so I can draw spray water out of there using the pump. It’s the Harbor Freight 79 CC pump and it works just great.
I rigged up a whole-house water filter from Menards to filter the water. If you didn’t do this, you’d clog up sprayer nozzles left and right. I just mounted this filter to a little carrier that keeps it upright and I use disposable filters. This takes all the sediment and floaties out of the water, the whole setup ran <$40. Water comes out perfectly clean and it doesn’t slow down the volume very much.
This pump saves a tremendous amount of time, I can fill the sprayer in 5 minutes and I’m back in the plot. It’s now easy to spray 4 to 5 tank loads in one morning session where before it would take all morning to do 2. This was a key efficiency gain for me because when you get the combination of low winds and the right weather to spray, it needs to happen fast.
I’m always looking for all the efficiency gains I can get. Now if there wa
Grouse
Thank you for the insight, yep stopped and chucked a lot of rocks on the past mowing session, I’m hoping to have a tractor with the attachments I want by next planting season but this year I have to go with rental equipment and they don’t have disc equipment.
Tom in Blaine
The harrow drags from Tractor Supply or Fleet farm work pretty well. They can be pulled with an ATV/UTV.
Tom – check out rental places for discs. I rented an ATV disc $50 for 4hours from Marv’s in princeton but I know other places have them too when I was looking around. I’ve got a small 1/3 acre plot but it was well worth the money for me to rent then try and do it another way.
Some of the discs I saw at retail I thought were very high priced and/or construction was questionable for lasting for years to come. I ended up waiting out for the right one on CL and found this one in the $300 range
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That’s a great score!
I have a disc on CL lacrosse just posted. $500. Maybe a IDO member discount could be arranged? Similar to the one above. I have 2 and keeping 1. It’s always been well taken care of and works perfect.
Pic on CL could be better. It was a quick pic. Never stored on the ground. I can provide better pictures if needed. Thanks.
Not to steal this thread. I just posted it for sale in classified ads on this site. 
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