I have about 20lbs of left over clover from last year. Anyone tried frost seeding clover in March or April? My main goal is to keep the plot weeds at bay during the spring/summer with clover, then spray GLY so I can plant the same plots with brassicas towards the end of July/early August(pending rain forecast).
You can spring plant clover, but for your need to keep weeds down, I would cover crop with oats or rye. It grows faster, gets taller and thicker, and costs less. As an added bonus, the deer love it!
Clover is not a good cover crop because it is relatively slow growing and does not grow as thick or as tall as a cereal grain.
Grouse
so I can plant the same plots with brassicas towards the end of July/early August(pending rain forecast).
If your final goal is to plant a forage crop late July, I’d go with buckwheat. It will out compete weeds and will also aggregate available phosphate and calcium and make it more available for your final brassica crop. You should be able to grow two rounds of buckwheat before late July. It also is easily knocked down and killed with light tillage and can be established by simply broadcasting the seed.
I agree with Grouse, use oats or rye. They are a much better weed suppressor although they will not get you the N you need for brassica. I guess it depends on your needs really. Do you want to suppress weed or provide nitrogen? Which is higher priority?
I have planted buckwheat in west central MN(Ottertail county) several times. It does work well to suppress weeds and bring nutrients to the top soil, BUT it is pretty expensive compared to oats and rye and has basically the same affect. BTW, there is no way you are getting two crop of buckwheat in Ottertail county before August. Buckwheat is extremely cold sensitive. If it even hears the word frost it will be dead within the hour. Plus if you plant it early(any time in May) the soil temp won’t be high enough which causes it to grow slow. You need 80 degree soil temp for ideal buckwheat planting temp. I had good luck with it planting in late May and ok luck planting it in mid May. Great cover crop, but not for us northern boys, at least not for double cropping…plus it’s $50 a 50lb bag or more. Oats and rye will do the same thing for $10-15 a bag.
Just to add that late July and August is too late to plant Brassicas in the northernmost states like MN, WI, SD, etc. Unless you get ideal weather, you won’t get maturity most years.
Assuming you’re in MN, you should be shooting for planting the week after July 4th or as soon as possible after that. Brassicas needs time to mature because it’s not the leaves the deer care about, it’s the big, juicy, root, which needs to be mature in order to sweeten.
Sticker has written all you need to know about buckwheat for the northern tier. It’s a southern crop for those who don’t have to worry about a late frosts.
Deer absolutely love young, tender oats and rye. A nice field of oats is deer candy in the late spring and early summer, they will just gorge themselves on it.
Grouse
I hear you. Buckwheat also can’t get wet, it shuts down completely. I often can run two 30 day rounds before my fall planted Brassica transplant in northern Washington county, not a problem. I find Buckwheat as a far better weed suppression crop than oats or rye, but I’m growing vegetables for human consumption, so the added cost is well worth it. Buckwheat also attracts pollinators and other beneficial insects, so I get added value out of it. I don’t feed deer, I fence them out. 
Great information guys. Appreciate it!
After thinking about it, adding more nitrogen is probably more important than keeping the weeds down. What would you recommend for that?
Grouse-I don’t know about the deer around you, but the deer around me start hammering the brassica leaves starting in September. Attached is a picture from a few years ago that was on 9/10. Look at the 2nd picture a couple months later(5 days before gun opener). In 2014, all of my plots looks like this and the hunting was sub par because they wiped everything out before the gun season. They don’t start eating the bulbs until it gets really cold and have snow on the ground.
Since then, I’ve made the plots bigger and added a few more. I still can’t seem to keep up with the browsing pressure. I did try over seeding winter rye into the plots around labor day last year and that seemed to help a little. However, most of the seeds did not germinate and likely were washed away with heavy rains.
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Well, if adding N credits is your top priority then clover is the way to go. What type of clover seed do you have? I don’t think any white clover will grow fast enough to produce much in the way of forage or N credits, but the plow down clovers like med red or crimson clover are good for this.
Boy, they really do wipe those plots out!!! I also notice heavy browse of the leaves in September in OTC
Here is some info on plow down clovers
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