Pat's Outdoor Adventures: Food Plot Planting Prep

On Friday, May 11, I headed out to Minburn for my annual trip to the Heartland Co-op to purchase food plot fertilizer. I had 14 5 gallon buckets with me and quickly got them filled. To my surprise, after driving off the scale I headed into the office where the guy working at the desk looked at my weigh sheet and proceeded to say "Only 550 lbs of fertilizer, Merry Christmas, you don't need to pay". After making sure that he was certain, I left with a big thank you and a smile.

Mom and dad were camping in the Des Moines area for the weekend so Dad decided to head down with me on Sunday morning to help get some work done. We left early so that we could make it to St. Pat's in Ottumwa for 8:00 am mass. After mass, we made our way through the fog to the cabin and got to work right away. Most of the work that we had to do was prep work for our Memorial Day weekend trip in 2 weeks when the majority of our food plots will be planted.

Dad got to work push mowing the yard and orchard while I headed down to put fertilizer on the ridge food plot. I was very happy to see how well the clover in that food plot is growing.

Clover on the ridge looks great!

After the fertilizer was spread, I pulled some of the trail camera cards then took over the push mowing so dad could head out with the ATV mower. The grass had grown like crazy and we needed to mow off some rye in the small field as well.

I'm pretty sure someone could have baled what we mowed

Can barely see the mower through all that grass

After the mowing was done, we got to work on spraying. Dad used the hand sprayer to spray gly around the buildings and fruit tree cages while I headed off with the ATV sprayer to spray off the 3 food plots that will be planted in 2 weeks along with the garden.

Spraying off a portion of the small field to plant clover in a couple weeks

We also got a start on planting the garden. Sweet corn, zucchini, and 2 sizes of pumpkins are all in the ground and should be up and growing when we are down there in a couple of weeks. With spraying off the grasses and weeds in the garden on the same day that we planted (it was tilled in the fall), the seeds should all germinate while the existing vegetation dies allowing the garden to get ahead of any new weeds.

Dad finishing up planting the last row of corn for the day

It was again too wet to burn off the plot screen, so we devised a plan to get that tilled and planted when were were there next time (that will involve a lot more manual labor). I'm really looking forward to the Memorial Day weekend trip as mom and dad are bringing down the camper and we are going to be mixing fun and work together. Hopefully we have great weather and everyone has a good time. For now, I will leave you with a couple more pictures that I took.