As the first warmer weather of
the year turns our minds to getting back outdoors and enjoying spring leisure
activities, it can be easy to forget about food plots. Avoiding that
temptation, though, yields big dividends. Controlling grass and weeds in perennial
forage stands is one reason that’s so especially important. Doing so is easy,
and it pays off in many ways for next hunting season and years to come.
Whitetail Institute perennial food plot
products are designed to attract and hold deer for multiple years from one
planting. As has been discussed in Whitetail News many times, following the
Whitetail Institute’s seedbed preparation and planting instructions is the best
way to ensure that your food plots can flourish. When your perennial is
established, though, don’t forget to also follow the Whitetail Institute’s forage-maintenance
instructions so your perennial plantings can keep performing at top levels and
last as long as they should. The Whitetail Institute offers Arrest Max, Slay
and Surefire Crop Oil Plus to help you fulfill one of the most important steps
in perennial maintenance: keeping grass and weeds under control.
The Steps in Whitetail Institute’s Forage
Instructions Work Together
Every Whitetail Institute food plot product
comes with a set of seedbed preparation and planting instructions on the bag
(these instructions are also available at whitetailinstitute.com). Perennial products
also provide maintenance recommendations. The Whitetail Institute drafts its
product instructions with two goals in mind: (1) Make sure that all the bases
are covered for ensuring that your planting has an optimum growing environment,
and (2) do it in as few steps as possible. Putting those together, you can see
why two things are true. First, if you cut corners with the Whitetail Institute’s
seedbed preparation, planting and forage maintenance instructions, it’s likely
to limit the positive results in terms of stand quality, stand longevity or
both. Second, many of the steps in the instructions are interdependent — multiple
steps combine to affect various growing conditions so you end up with a growing
environment that’s optimum for the food plot product you planted, and that it
stays that way during the life of the stand. Grass control is an excellent
example. Our first thought about grass control is that it’s only a matter of
forage maintenance, so those are the only instruction steps that apply to it.
In other words, grass only comes to mind if we see it, and if we see it, we
spray it. Period. End of story. The truth, though, is that grass control also
involves seedbed preparation, and that’s also true of weed control. Perhaps the
most important lesson I learned from Dr. Carroll Johnson, the Whitetail Institute’s
weed and herbicide scientist, is, “Grass and weeds are opportunists. They tend
to show up most heavily in the part of our plots that are thin—where there is
room for grass and weeds to get a good foothold.” That is, the better job we
can do of providing an optimum growing environment in a food plot, the less
room there will be for grass and weeds to invade. In that way, the seedbed
preparation and forage maintenance steps concerning soil pH and soil fertility are
extremely important to keep grass and weeds in check today and during the
entire life of the planting.
Controlling Grass and Weeds as Part of Perennial
Food Plot Maintenance
No matter how good a job we do of ensuring
that perennial forages have an optimum growing environment, grass and weeds
will almost certainly return at some point. And that’s where the forage
maintenance instructions come into play by providing control advice for grass
and weeds that appear after planting. The Whitetail Institute offers three
superb tools for helping you keep grass and weeds in check: Arrest Max, Slay
and Surefire Crop Oil Plus. “When it comes to perennial food plot maintenance,
grass control is your No. 1 priority. If you don’t control grass, it can take
over a plot in a hurry.” That was one of the most important and often-repeated cautions
of the Whitetail Institute’s first director of forage research, Dr. Wiley
Johnson. And anyone who has let grass go unchecked in a food plot knows how
true it is. The best time to use herbicides is in the early spring before the
grass or weeds have a chance to mature.
Arrest Max (selective grass herbicide).
All Whitetail Institute perennial food plot
products are now Arrest Max approved to make it easier for you to control grass
that appears in your perennials. Arrest Max is the newest generation of
selective grass herbicides, and although it’s similar in use to earlier grass
herbicides such as Arrest, it’s a big step up in several ways. Arrest Max
controls more kinds of grass than Arrest, it generally controls grass better
and the mixing instructions are even easier. And Arrest Max will even let you
stretch your food plot dollars farther. One pint of Arrest Max will make one acre
of spray solution for Whitetail Institute perennials. You can find the full
list of grasses Arrest Max controls on the Arrest Max package and at www.whitetailinstitute.com. Arrest Max also provides better control of grasses that have been allowed
to mature. With Arrest, mowing mature or perennial grasses a week or so before
spraying was recommended to allow time for the mowed grass to resume growing
and grow more vigorously to try to recover the foliage it lost when mowed,
allowing it to take Arrest in better. With Arrest Max, though, mowing before
spraying is not recommended. In fact, the herbicide label says not to. This is
an excellent example of how much easier Arrest Max is to use. Another reason
for the superior performance of Arrest Max is that it comes with an adjuvant
already mixed in. Even so, it’s still a good idea to add Surefire Crop Oil Plus
to the Arrest Max spray tank when the grasses to be treated are perennial or
mature. And because Surefire is so inexpensive, there’s no reason not to add it
to the Arrest Max spray tank.
Slay (selective broadleaf-weed). Of course, no selective herbicide I know of can control every type
of grass and other weeds that might appear in a food plot, and that’s also true
of Arrest Max. For example, Arrest Max won’t control sedges such as nutsedge
(also called nutgrass), but like many other weeds Arrest Max won’t control,
nutsedge can be controlled with the Whitetail Institute’s Slay herbicide. That’s
one reason it’s so important to identify the grass or weed you’re trying to
control and then check the herbicide label to make sure the herbicide will
work. Slay is labeled for use in established stands of Imperial Whitetail
Clover and in other clover or alfalfa. Also, for Slay to work, you MUST mix an
adjuvant such as Surefire Crop Oil Plus into the Slay spray tank.
Surefire Crop Oil Plus. Surefire is an agricultural oil that’s tailormade for food
plotters. It’s vegetable based, not petroleum based, and it even contains an
anti-foaming agent to help you mix the spray tank correctly.
Mixing the Arrest Max and Slay Spray
Solutions
To spray one acre with Arrest Max: Use 15 to 20 gallons of water,* plus one pint of Arrest Max, plus
1/2 pint of Surefire Crop Oil Plus.**
To spray one acre with Slay: Again, use 15 to 20 gallons of water* (20 is preferred), plus four
ounces of Slay, plus (required) 1/2 pint of Surefire Crop Oil Plus.***
To spray one acre with Arrest Max and
Slay: Use 15 to 20 gallons of water,* plus one pint
of Arrest Max, plus four ounces of Slay, plus 1/2 pint of Surefire Crop Oil
Plus.*** * 20 gallons of water per acre is preferred ** highly recommended ***
required for Slay to work. Finally, don’t overlook the mowing recommendation
you’ll find in the maintenance instructions for each Whitetail Institute
perennial food plot product. Your goal when mowing each spring is to keep
anything growing in the plot (grass, weeds and even the forage plants) from
having a chance to flower. From a grass and weed control perspective, your goal
should be to remove any seed heads or flowers from grasses and weeds before
they have a chance to dry and produce viable seed. By being diligent about your
mowing, you can often break the reseeding cycle on annual weeds. Mowing two or
three times each spring and summer is sufficient in most cases. If you have
weeds that tend to flower in mid-to-late summer, be sure you mow again to keep those
from reseeding. Try to mow so your forage plants stay at about 6 to 8 inches
tall. Don’t wait too long to mow, because it’s not a good idea to take off more
than a few inches off the tops of the forage plants at a time. If you mow more
deeply, you might take off too much foliage, which can stress the plants and
speed moisture evaporation from the soil. And, of course, don’t mow when
conditions are excessively hot or droughty.
The Big Picture
So far, we’ve discussed why keeping grass and
weeds under control is important to make sure your food plots last as long as
they should. Consider also that doing your part to keep your perennial food
plots as healthy as possible during spring and summer can have a huge effect on
the quality of deer you hunt the next fall. Spring and summer are when bucks
are re-growing antlers, does are pregnant and, later, when does are producing
milk for their newborn fawns. Each of these processes takes huge amounts of
nutrients, especially protein, and it takes high-performance food plots to make
sure they have the protein they need. You can see how important controlling
grass and weeds is if you think of your food plot as a parking lot with a
limited number of parking spaces, representing root space. Your goal is to have
as many of the parking slots as possible occupied by your high-quality forage plants.
That makes it much harder for grass and weeds to find an open space in the lot
to park (seedbed preparation instructions). And if grass or weeds find a space,
you have a wrecker on standby to remove them (forage maintenance instructions).
For additional information about Arrest Max, Slay, Surefire Crop Oil Plus and
grass and weed control in general, visit whitetailinstitute.com, or call the
Whitetail Institute at (800) 688-3030, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m CST Monday thru
Friday.
