Acorns In Clover

Success!  

3/19/17

Project:  Try to stimulate acorn production in and around the food plot while also using the space underneath the oaks to grow white clover.  This would set up a fantastic early October bow hunting location bringing together two top choices of deer, bear, and grouse at that time.  

The idea struck me last summer when I saw no acorns on any of my bur oaks.  Not surprising given it was an extremely wet year, and the oaks seemed to be suffering from a seasonal bout of anthracnose.  Thankfully, that's not a fatal disease and will go away when normal moisture conditions return.

The property is covered in bur oak, so I wanted to focus my efforts on some place I could actually hunt these if it proves out.  I picked out 12 trees around the north food plot.  They are getting four key inputs from me in this trial.

Lime:  The soil here is very low in magnesium and that can cause some nutrient tie up when they get out of balance.  I bought Waukesha Limestone from Tractor Supply.  That is a dolomitic limestone that is 19% calcium, and 12% magnesium.  This will help drive up the magnesium in the soil.  The lime will also help raise the soil pH from a level of 5.6 to around 6.5.  This should also help the oaks more effectively pull nutrients from the soil.

Gypsum:  For the uninformed, gypsum is simply calcium sulfate.  Don't really need any calcium, but it's a cheap and effective way to put sulfur in the soil.  Sulfur doesn't stick around in a well drained soil, so I had to add about a 400lb/ac rate to these trees.

Sunlight:  Healthy trees need sun.  It's that simple.  I'm taking the chainsaw to the brush and competing trees to get them out of the way of the sun, and to help reduce the uptake from around the oak roots.

Reduced Friction:  There are/were all kinds of different trees growing into these oaks.  I've seen it in apples where the brush rubs up against your mast producing trees, they fail to set any fruit.  A little bit of chainsaw work and those competitors were gone.

It will be a little while until we know whether or not this works, but next steps are to finish plot building with the skid steer.  A lot of this remaining brush will get pushed out with that.  Before that happens, I will be up in May some time to do a spring burn down.  This will include a hand spraying around the oaks to get prepped for clover.  I'm not quite sure what I'll do there yet, if I'll go with an annual red to get me through this year, or just kill it and wait until fall to plant white.

Either way, it's going now.  As it unfolds, I'll keep the story going here.

8/7/17

The clover has been planted.  It's primarily white ladino clover along with some medium red, berseem, and crimson.  

9/3/17

No pics of clover yet, but there are a few acorns falling.  Not a bumper crop, but progress.  Size is all over the board.  Most are like the tiny one, but there are also some nice ones.

9/16/17

Now that the plots are up and running, the clover is starting to show through.  The stand looks pretty good under most, hopefully the rest will fill in.