If you missed the announcement in the previous issue of Whitetail News, be sure not to miss this. Imperial Whitetail Beets & Greens is a new fall annual food plot product from the Whitetail Institute. It’s a diverse blend of fast-growing turnips, beets and radishes that establish and grow quickly, provide lots of succulent foliage above ground, and also produce turnips, beets and radishes underground that will attract deer and provide them with food options from fall through winter. The key to Beets & Greens’ performance is its forage components and the ratios in which they’re blended. Attraction is maximized through the various food options offered within the same plot throughout the life of the stand.
Forage Components and Performance
Designed for planting in late summer or fall, Beets & Greens is designed to provide deer with choices of multiple food sources in the same plot continuously from fall through winter. And as is the case with other Whitetail Institute seed blends, Beets & Greens includes forage components only available in Whitetail Institute products.
Each component of Beets & Greens has been carefully selected using a broad range of criteria, including attractiveness to deer, rapid establishment, prolific growth and abundant production, and then blended in precise ratios Whitetail Institute testing has shown to maximize the performance of the stand.
Sugar beets are so high in sugar they’re commercially grown throughout the world for sugar production. Sugar-beet tops are highly attractive to deer immediately, offering them substantial levels of protein and carbohydrates they need for energy from fall to the late season and beyond.
Beets & Greens also contains Tall Tine Turnip, the only turnip variety scientifically developed for food plots for deer. Tall Tine Turnips produce abundant foliage and large, sweet tubers. The foliage provides variety with other brassicas in Beets & Greens, as they begin to attract deer during the early hunting season and become even sweeter with the first frosts of fall. The turnip tubers continue to attract deer and provide them with critical nutrition during winter. Beets & Greens also includes the Whitetail Institute’s proprietary kale variety, WINA 210K, which the Whitetail Institute developed according to the same stringent protocols followed in developing Tall Tine Turnip. Some other types of kale are coarse and indigestible, produce tight heads instead of loose leaves, and don’t grow quickly or tall. WINA 210K Kale suffers none of those drawbacks. It’s a vegetable cultivar that grows large, individual leaves instead of a head, and the leaves are extremely attractive to deer.
The final component, WINA 412 Radish, helps maximize the attraction of the stand by adding variety to the forage and tuber offerings of the plot. WINA 412 Radish and Tall Tine Turnip can also help improve soil quality in two ways. First, the turnip and radish tubers drill down as they grow, helping to aerate heavier, compacted soils. WINA 412 Radish, for example, produces tubers that can push several feet deep even into compacted clay soils and grow as thick as softdrink bottles — much larger than the small, round radishes we commonly see in grocery stores. Second, any turnip and radish tubers remaining the next spring also add organic matter to the soil as they break down. The Whitetail Institute also coats Beets & Greens seeds with Rainbond to ensure seedling survival. Rainbond absorbs up to 200 times its weight in moisture from the soil and keeps it next to the seeds as they sprout and grow. Beets & Greens is available in 3-pound bags that will plant a half acre, and 12-pound bags that will plant two acres. For more information, go to whitetailinstitute.com, or call (800) 688-3030.
