My local farm supply/seed store sells alsike, crimson, ladino, mammoth/medium red, and white dutch. Any certain varieties better than another? I will be planting in the spring along with some chicory and oats. Also I will be trying the "throw and mow" method, so i wont be drilling them directly into the ground.
IF going with solid clover and even chicory seed right when temps are freezing and thawing and freezing and thawing. This will naturally sit the seed and clover/chicory (clover especially) does well with this approach. I prefer a mix of many clovers as all grow best in different soil types, can handle more/less sun and drought/wet weather. Throwing all my eggs in one seed type is something I refuse to do personally.
If you are hunting turkeys as well, the Crimson Clover will help keep them in. It's an annual instead of perennial. Definitely "mix" it up. I use Pinnacle Clover. It is a white clover with very large leaves. The deer are definitely using it. JMO
Yup! Anytime you can attract bees is a good thing for the entire eco-system on the property. With all the apples and pears on my property now I really like getting more stuff involved to get bees over. I've even thought about planting a wild/native flower mix on a place I enter/exit as I don't really desire deer there...
Yep, I handle bees so I'm biased to start with but no doubt bees are good for the environment. The benefits to that fact trickle down in ways we don't even imagine. Food producing plants all produce better with bees so one can imagine the scope in which that effects our wildlife as well as ourselves in every way. We're starting to focus on pollinators here on the ranch as well as pollinator friendly pasture refurbishment. Lots of forbs and legumes, they benefit such a wide array of beneficial insects, soil fertility and wildlife that it's almost sickening now to think about all the land that's just basically wasted by sitting idle or grazed in the ground all year long or crop field edges that are non-productive. Wild flower mixes are great but be weary of what's in them if you don't want to attract deer to them. Many of those species would work as a food plot.
I mean if deer are there it isn't a terrible thing but not a purpose behind it. Your field edges area is my biggest thing I tell folks to focus on...the wasted space right there that just gets over run by fescue and crap is amazing. One guy had a 70 acre farm and when I added all those edges up came up with nearly 4 acres of deadzone he wasn't utilizing. Even switching those areas over to clover mixes boosts valuable food sources and like we touched on will attract bees if you allow the clover to flower! He has since planted apple/pears down two of the largest rows, Miscanthus strips cross secting the edges into "small chunks" (sight blocking) and clover throughout and around it all. He has instantly in just two years time increased sightings along the edges as he is a gun guy that loves his heated elevated field blinds
Absolutely. Part of the ranch I farm has 150 acres of farm ground in five smallish fields. That was signed into the CRP buffer strip program ten years ago for edge habitat. 35' borders mostly in grass around all the fields added up to roughly 40 acres. Those borders are all next to brush anyway, most years they won't grow much of a cash crop. It went out this fall, I'm going to re-do those as the native was always poor. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with them but it'll also serve as graze for cattle when I rotate them around to graze the cover crops in the crop fields. Probably partially serve as their fiber/hay ration in zoned swaths.
