Sunflowers

Over the past month or so I've been preparing a field on one of the ridgetops at Chaplin Bend to plant sunflowers for a dove field.  On May 4 I was able to get the seeds planted, racing to beat a thunderstorm that was bearing down on me.

I planted two varieties of sunflower seed that day.  The larger part of the field I planted with Clearfield sunflowers, a special hybrid designed to be resistant to Beyond herbicide (think of Roundup-ready Corn, but these are Beyond-ready Sunflowers).  Around the edges and at the far end of the field I planted just some regular Peredovik sunflowers.

Because I was racing the rain, I was not able to cover the seeds as well as I would have liked.  I planted them in rows with my seeder and cultipacked the field, but there were still lots of seeds just laying on the surface of the ground, where the birds had easy access to them. The good news is that it rained hard within an hour of the seed being planted.

As of last week, the Clearfield sunflowers were coming up great, having germinated and moved along to the four-leaf stage:

The Peredovik seed, on the other hand, had produced next to nothing--the edges and the far end are nearly bare.  Did all of that seed get eaten by birds?  Or was it bad seed?

To address the problem, On Thursday May 17 I re-disced the edges and far end of the field and replanted them.  At the far end I planted a pound or so of wildlife mix (sunflowers, millet, corn, a little of this, a little of that) that my friend Brandon Campbell from NRCS had given me.  Around the edges I planted the Peredovik seed that had been left over from the first planting.  This time, after I planted I lightly disced the field again to cover the seed a bit.  Here's hoping that this time the seed will germinate.

But we need rain!

Native Grass

Like most farms in Kentucky, the pasture at Chaplin Bend was primarily tall fescue, with some white and red clover thrown in for good measure.  Fescue is great for pasture but lousy for wildlife.  So one of my main objectives for the first year at Chaplin Bend Farm is to replace nearly all of the fescue with better habitat.  About 30 acres in the bottom was killed to make room for corn this Spring.  And next Winter we'll replace about 50 acres with a variety of trees and shrubs.

But my big project for this Spring was to kill another 50 acres or so of fescue and replace it with a mix of native warm season grasses, including Little Bluestem, Side-oats Gramma, Wild Rye and Indiangrass, and wildflowers, such as False Sunflower, Purple Coneflower, and Partridge Pea.  This mixture show create great habitat for quail and rabbits and will also be better than fescue for deer, turkeys, and more or less everything else.

I began spraying a few weeks ago to kill the existing pasture;  this week I planted 53 acres with the new grasses and forbs. I acquired the seed from Roundstone Seed in Upton Kentucky.  The seeder--a Truax Flex II Drill--was provided at no cost by the Mercer County Conservation District.  Here's a picture:

The Truax has a seed box specifically designed to handle native grass seed, which is very fluffy and hairy.  The seed box includes specially designed agitators that keep the seed from clumping up and draw it to the feeder:

Brandon Campbell from the Mercer County NRCS office came out last Friday to show me how to operate the Truax.  Not too complicated really once you understand how to set the seeding rate.

I started seeding early Wednesday morning and finished late Friday afternoon, having planted 540 pounds of seed across about 53 acres.  Lots of hours on the tractor, but thankfully everything worked properly.  I was a little worried for a while that I was going to run out of seed before I ran out of ground, but in the end everything came out nearly perfectly.

Do you know that feeling you have after you've been on the lake all day in a small boat?  Where you still feel the motion of the waves even though you're standing on solid ground?  That's how I feel tonight after 24 hours or so bobbing and rocking on the tractor over the last three days.

Now we hope for rain!

Quail

One of my objectives for Chaplin Bend Farm is to develop a healthy population of quail. To accomplish that I'm planting 60 acres or so or native grasses and windflowers, creating more edge and cover habitat, and developing food plots. But all of that will only work if there are quail around to take advantage of my work. Well yesterday while I was working down by the farm I heard, for the first time at Chapln Bend, the familiar "Bob White" call of a male quail! He was calling on the hill across the valley from the barn--one of the sites where we'll be planting native grasses in a week or so. Needless to say I was encouraged to know that there are at least a few quail around. Here's hoping for a thriving population a few years down the road.