If your food plot plantings begin to take on a dull finish, a sour-note color that is less than vibrant green and obvious to the eye, then you likely have a soil pH issue.
Your next move should be to get a soil test so that you know exactly what plant nutrients your soils are providing and lacking. Have your soils tested on a regular basis.
Adding lime to your soil is the only way to control the pH levels in order to make an attempt to bring the chemical balance back within normal ranges. The pH testing range is from 1 to 14 with a 7 being neutral. A value less than a 7 is considered as an acidic soil, whereas a value over 7 being alkaline.
Ideally, for Mississippi soils to maximize plant production the pH values need to be on that 7 mark. Values between 6.7 and 7 will produce high quality forage given everything else is done correctly to plant and yield a good wildlife food plot.
Gary Adams, member of a Holmes County hunting camp, has experience in the matter.
“For the past several years we started noticing how dull green our ryegrass plantings were,” he said. “We had the soils tested again and found out the pH was out of whack. So we started adding lime a couple months ahead of the hunting season’s food plot preparations.”
This particular camp had sixteen individual food plots on 600 acres. To reduce the costs, the number of plots was drastically cut back to six or eight spread across the property. The three-year project calls for roughly two tons of lime per acre spread by a heavy-duty spreader.
Adams’ camp is in its second season of the liming application, and already the difference is noticeable. Hopefully the deer and other wildlife will notice a difference in the taste of the wildlife plantings and be more attracted to the food plots.
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