I know many of you are experiencing horriffic drought. I pray the Lord sends rain on your hunting lands! This is one plant from my soybean FP. I have 1 1/2 acres of these. Best soys I have ever raised for deer, and they are in an area that it extremely heavily browsed. Have never been able to get soys above 6 inches on this plot. So I will share my secret weapon to keep the deer from eating them off in june and early July. HOT SUACE! I know your luaghing at me right now. I will tell you how it all started. I was laying in bed last winter dream about having a late season food source of soybeans and how it has never been possible. The deer would just simply consume them all before they could grow anything. Well I had read about using hot pepper wax to keep the deer from consuming garden veggies. then it hit me. I would plant round up readdy beans, and mix hot suace in with the round up. If they died, then I would take the loss. Well, they didn't die. I have sprayed them three or four times. All I had to do was remove the screens from the sprayer so the suace would flow well. They still experience browse pressure. (30 plus deer a night are walking by them.) It is however significantly reduced. They have made it now, I am stoked, it looks like my dream of that soybean field full of deer may just come into fruition this december! Sorry to write so much, wanted to share a success story on raising Soybeans on limited acreage! Hope it will work again next year! Be blessed!
Very cool! Hot peppers grow very well in my home garden. Perhaps I will need to start dabbling in making my own hot 'dual purpose' sauces.
dan, they are a commercial soybean. All be it they are designed more for row beans, they get bushy. The foliage is awesome, foliar feeding really helped two weeks ago. They are just beginning to set pods, lots of flowers as well. they will be setting pods into mid to late august. I would say looking the plant over they would go between 50-60 bushels to acre if harvested. I counted 50 plus pods on it, most are only about 1/2 inch long, they are just starting, as well as around another 25 flowers. Barring a massacre from the deer they will look amazing in three weeks, we just got another two inches of rain over the last day and a half.
Thanks for sharing! I just put some in the ground and may have to try that until they get a little bit of growth to them. Might make for a very exciting October
thanks guys, I sure hope you all get lots of rain for your brassica plots. mine will be in the ground within 10 days hopefully.
I planted those between may 1-4, not sure what day it was, just some where in first week of may off the top of my head.
Just curious. We never had the water/rain to get ours planted so keeping seed for next season. Thanks!
Andrew, Did you dilute the hot sauce with water (something like 1:5) or did you use the sauce straight up?
I would pour a bottle into my atv sprayer, which was 15 gallons, so it was like a 20 onces hot suace to 15 gallon of water. so i would think if you went two onces of hot suace per gallon of water you would be fine. I am not sure if it was just the smell or the taste or both that helped keep the deer off of them. the plot can be observed from the house, as they got ou of the ground I noticed that one night there was around a dozen deer on the plot. So the next day I went and tried it. That night they herd walked around the plot and would not even hardly (rare occurences only) walk through it. The plot is on the back end of a 10 or so acre wheat field. every night there will be around thirty deer come through the area. So far they have just as a whole avioded the beans when the Hot Suace spray is on them. for around a week or two depending on rain frequency.
