StrategicHabitat.com - Habitat Plans and Hunting Setups
Randy VanderVeen 616-560-7488 randy@seemorebucks.com
HarperGrowingSolutions.com - Plot Dr Liquid Lime and Fertilizer
Brad Harper 616-403-0098 bradh.hgs@gmail.com
Now that it’s early July, landowners are about 4-6 weeks away from planting Fall food plots. There is so much to talk about regarding food plots from what to plant, when to plant and how to plant, that it can be pretty overwhelming with all the videos out there.
So much depends on region of the country, local habitat and vegetation types, soil types, deer densities, and woody browse availability. All these factors come into play when deciding what, when and how to plant.
But in this video, I’m going to talk about why I and many other landowners switched from synthetic salt based fertilizers and lime, to carbon based liquid lime and fertilizers….and how to add them to your tank the right way.
So the first week of June on a client property in southern MI, the landowner and I planted corn with his Genesis 5 drill into winter rye grain and crimson clover which was terminated 3 weeks earlier.
Just before planting, I broadcast granular urea for more nitrogen and let the drill push some of it into the soil instead of broadcasting afterward and allowing it all to evaporate on the surface.
Even though there’s 8 tubes for seed to flow down out of the seed box, we covered up 5 of them with plates for wider corn rows, making it a 3 row drill.
After planting it was time to fertilize and lime.
Now since this field wasn’t in food production by the previous owner, the nutrient levels had a ways to go according to the soil sample results.
So I emailed the results to Brad at Harper Growing Solutions so he could figure out exactly what liquid amendments from Plot Dr I need.
This my 4th year using Plot Dr and I’ll never go back to using granular fertilizer again.
My good friend Jake Ehlinger has made the switch on his farm as well and we share pictures of our plots because we’re not used to the difference in how well our plants germinate and take off. We get the same feedback from our clients who started using it.
So if you’re gonna start using Plot Dr this year, there’s a certain way you’re gonna want to add these liquids to your tank.
First, you need to know how many gallons your spray tank puts out per acre. This is important and you should only have to figure this out once. If you don’t know, there’s a few different ways to figure it out which you can find on KZfaq. But let me give you the quick easy redneck way to get close.
Just measure out a quarter acre of ground. You can do this with a laser rangefinder or laying down a track with OnX maps, or zooming in with Google Earth to draw out a quarter acre piece of your food plot.
Then put exactly 10 gallons of plain water in your spray tank and go spray that quarter acre at a set speed of about 4 mph. When you’ve covered the quarter acre, stop and check how much water you used. Take the number of gallons you sprayed times 4.
This will give you the amount of water your tank will spray per acre at the same speed of your test.
Easy Peasy.
Now when you’re ready to fill your tank, start out with about half the amount of water you’ll need. In other words, leave plenty of room in the tank for adding Plot Dr liquids because you’ll be mixing them with water in a 5 gallon bucket, and then adding them to the tank.
That’s because the lime and calcium are really thick and concentrated. If you poured it directly into your tank without mixing it with water first, it would sink to the bottom and probably clog your screens and nozzles.
Now I need to use this whole 2.5 gallon jug of liquid lime because the pH is pretty low.
So I put a couple gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket and pour in about a third of the jug and stir it up with a clean broom handle to make a slurry. Then I pour the bucket into the tank which is already circulating. This keeps the lime suspended in the water and prevents nozzles from getting clogged.
You can see there’s nothing left in the bucket like there would have been if I didn’t stir up.
I did that 2 more times in order to empty the whole jug. You can see the last third of the jug came out slower and thicker. If I would have only needed half the jug, I would have shook the jug better at first to really mix it up.
Most guys are surprised to learn that 1 gallon of plot dr lime has as much lime as 2000 lbs of
powdered ag lime. So the 2.5 gallon jug I just used is equal to 5000 lbs of ag lime.
And since powdered ag lime is a pain to apply and won’t go through a regular fertilizer spreader, which would you rather transport, carry and apply.
The other great thing about Plot Dr lime is that it helps seed germinate quickly in low pH soil whereas the powdered ag lime not only needs to be disked or tilled in the ground, it still takes a few months to raise the pH to where plants will benefit from it.