How To Plant The Milo Blend Food Plot For Max Tonnage In The Fall

In this video I explain how to plant the milo blend food plot for deer in June so that you will have 3 different layers of food in the same plot for maximum tonnage. I planted milo, soy beans, sugar beets and rutabagas with a Genesis 5 drill, and broadcast cereal rye and red clover later in September. John at Northwoods Whitetails Video:    • HOW TO PLANT MILO FOOD PLOTS    http://StrategicHabitat.com - Habitat Plans and Hunting Setups Randy VanderVeen - 616-560-7488 - [email protected] A couple years ago I started planting milo by itself in long strips as a visual screen to breakup large food plots. This was a special red milo I bought from Northwoods Whitetails which gets a little taller than the normal milo being sold at feed and farm supply stores. It grew well in my poor soil right along with weeds and the deer never touched it all summer until the grain heads matured in October. They taste a lot like corn and deer demolished it during bow season. But by firearm season there was nothing left. So last year John at Northwoods started planting a blend of early and late season food in his plots in the UP. He combined his red milo with peas, sugar beets and rutabagas. It did really well feeding deer through early and late season. A couple things he noticed was he wished he would have increased the row spacing of the milo from 15 to 22 inches and instead of using peas, he’s gonna use soybeans this year. So that’s what I’m going to be planting in 2 different ¾ acre plots that had rye and red clover growing from last Falls planting. The rye had to be terminated 3 weeks ago because planting into green rye would have a negative impact on Milo because of its allelopathic effect on other grasses like Milo. I’ll be drilling in the soybeans first by themselves because the seed size is so much bigger than the other 3. Even though this drill can plant 8 rows, I’m only gonna plant 3 rows at 22” apart so the soybeans don’t shade out the other plants. Now you can buy steel plates to shut off the rows you don’t want and get seed box dividers but I’m only planting 1.5 acres so this cardboard with tape will do the trick. I set the seed depth wheels to 1 inch but can still adjust the depth in the field by tilting the drill. I’ll have no problem getting to 1.5 inches deep since these plots are pretty sandy. After drilling half of the first plot east and west, I stopped to add a seed treatment which is supposed to promote better root and plant growth. I’ll be posting an update video on those results later this summer. Now that the beans are in, I use a vacuum to suck out the extra seeds and set the drill to plant milo and sugar beets. These seeds are about the same size and I’m only planting 3 rows each of these at 22” wide. Since they’re a lot smaller seed than soybeans, the drill had to be dialed back to about 5# per acre, and the seed depth wheels had to be raised to only a half inch deep, and then double check the actual depth during the first pass. By now it’s starting to sprinkle and the radar was showing I’m about to get soaked. Since the milo will be the tallest of the 4 plants, I drilled these in north and south to allow more sunlight into the rows at high noon. Also added the seed treatment after planting half the field. Since it doesn’t work on brassicas, I only added it to the milo pockets. The last seed to go on are the Rutabagas. These are really small like most brassicas and can be broadcasted if you have some rain in the forecast to pound them into the ground. This couldn’t have worked out any better. In order to get good even coverage when broadcasting, I walked east and west with half the rate and then north south for a total of about 3 pounds per acre. Thankfully it rained for the next several hours. The next morning I sprayed both plots with Dual 2 magnum preemergent herbicide and followed that up with 1 pass of Full Spectrum liquids according to the soil test results. We were fortunate to get more timely rain in June and after 8 days we had liftoff. 3 weeks later things are looking good as well as my nemesis the dreaded horse nettle weed that were already in these plots. But every year I think I’m gaining ground on them. Now if you don’t have a tractor and a drill, that doesn’t mean you can’t plant this same milo blend. In John’s video he explains how to do it with ATV spreaders or hand spreaders. There’s a link to that video below. I’m looking forward to watching the progress of these plots this summer and how the deer use them this Fall. If you want to follow along hit subscribe, leave a comment below and I’ll see you on the next video.