Food Plots Sunflowers 2014

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Chaneylake

Chaneylake

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on the wings of a snow white dove
1. disc ground late March

2. run scratcher do-all, while running the scratcher I will also be spraying 1.5 quarts per acre of "Treflan".

3. anytime around April 20th if soil temperature is 50� or higher at 8:00 am, I will be ready to plat.

4. Planting info: seed I am using is Syngenta 7111 HO/CL/DM, 61 day flowering, 89 days total to mature

seed spacing in theory is 1 seed every 5.5 inches on 38 inch rows
while planting I will be spraying out the back of the planter 4 ounces of Spartan, 1.5 quarts of Prowl and 2 ounces of insecticide per acre

5. once I have a stand of sunflower plants I will apply $50.00 of ammonia nitrate per acre, we never use fertilizer anymore

6. at the 6-8 leaf stage on sunflower plants I will apply 4 ounces of Beyond per acre.

7. sometime around 90 days from planting date I will spray all fields with Graxmone[42 ounces] and Direx[24 ounces] per acre.
this will kill anything in all fields that the other chemicals did not kill. this will also make the plants dry down faster

8. about 14 days before dove season opens I will bushog about 10% of every field, all that I mow is a strip around all fields and not over 2 strips through each field with a 10 foot wide bushog

8. starting September 1, hunt like "hello" every day
 
Chaneylake have you ever used the lightning ready sunflowers? We have used them the last 5 years they are expensive but work well for us. I may try your method this year on 1 of our fields. I have sprayed Spartan a time or two and it worked well also.
 
yes, I used lightning one time for spot spraying, it worked great

the main reason I listed the chemicals that I am using is because we are to many years in the same location without a chemical change

on a side note the Helena Chemical reps in my area are liking my plan real well and are wanting weekly pictures to study the results

this is a rather expensive plan but if it works it will make the chemical reps happy and maybe I will get a chemical perk for 2015
 
A.Hall said:
I'll let you know how mine turns out...planning on using some the same chemicals
Click to expand...

I found an 80 day maturity seed today, the name is NuSun, I do not remember the seed number, 80 days relative maturity, 44-48 inch plant height, the short height will handle winds better if we have a storm and the shorter plant is by far easier to spray over the top, google it spoon
 
most any sunflower variety will grow ok in weak soil, basically the only soil thats not good for them is low laying damp/wet type soil

the soil at my house is real weak and heavy clay type soil, yet the sunflowers here do better than average if I take care of them
 
KubotaM4900 said:
I'd like to see some past pics if you have any. What type of tag-a-long sprayer set up do you use?
Click to expand...

I have an old rebuilt 25 foot wide fold out spray boom, its mounted on the back of a 100 hp tractor and I have a 200 gallon tank on the front of tractor
 
Chaneylake said:
A.Hall said:
I'll let you know how mine turns out...planning on using some the same chemicals
Click to expand...

I found an 80 day maturity seed today, the name is NuSun, I do not remember the seed number, 80 days relative maturity, 44-48 inch plant height, the short height will handle winds better if we have a storm and the shorter plant is by far easier to spray over the top, google it spoon
Click to expand...

I'll do some research on them, thanks for the info!
 
Planting only an acre will be very expensive. Planting rate is 15-18000 per acre @ 170-200 dollars a bag. A bag on avg will plant about 2.5 acres. Now think about your chemicals
 
Chaneylake and A. Hall, if you don't have a planter, what would you do different if you were forced to broadcast the seeds? I have tillage equipment and the ability to spray but don't have a planter. Just wanted to pick y'all's brains.
 
Carlos Viagra said:
ADR said:
Chaneylake and A. Hall, if you don't have a planter, what would you do different if you were forced to broadcast the seeds? I have tillage equipment and the ability to spray but don't have a planter. Just wanted to pick y'all's brains.
Click to expand...
Same here.

BTW couldn't I save half the seeds for 2015?
Click to expand...

yes you can easily save seeds for next year, broadcasting will work just as well, I did the broadcast before I purchased a planter

I mixed seed with fertilizer and cut the output rate in half and went over fields in opposite directions twice to get a more uniform spreading, I them ran a disc over sown fields as lightly as possible, I do not remember any problems using this process
 
Thank you for the input Chaneylake and jmb4wd, is there a secret to keeping finches (especially golden finches) from eating all the seeds? The last time I planted sunflowers they raided all the seeds.
 
Chaneylake, how does this affect your deer hunting in that area? Or do you even deer hunt in that area? I've considered a couple times of putting in some dove plots on (3) pastures I have that are sort of broke up into (1) 3 acre field and (2) fields that are 1.5 acre each. I'm just too worried it would negatively affect my deer hunting with the pressure and gun fire.
 
ADR said:
Thank you for the input Chaneylake and jmb4wd, is there a secret to keeping finches (especially golden finches) from eating all the seeds? The last time I planted sunflowers they raided all the seeds.
Click to expand...

the finches are usually the first birds to hit our fields, to my knowledge they have never eaten enough seed to bother anything.

we do have one field that the migrating blackbirds or starlings will completely clean a field this has happened sometime in November the past 2 years
 
ADR said:
Thank you for the input Chaneylake and jmb4wd, is there a secret to keeping finches (especially golden finches) from eating all the seeds? The last time I planted sunflowers they raided all the seeds.
Click to expand...

the finches are usually the first birds to hit our fields, to my knowledge they have never eaten enough seed to bother anything.

we do have one field that the migrating blackbirds or starlings will completely clean a field this has happened sometime in November the past 2 years
 

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