today we're going to show you how to plant the perfect Dove field
how's it going guys welcome back to the pilot Patriot Channel now I know most
you that watch this channel are gun guys but I bet a lot of you are hunters too
and dove hunting is one of the most popular types of hunting
so today we're out in what is going to be my dove field now a lot of you
probably been on dove hunts before either somebody else put on a dove hunt
there are always a lot of paid hunts around that you can go to and pay
whoever's field it is and they'll let you hunt out there things like that and
I've always had family that had a dove field every year I remember when I was
13 years old when on my first death hunt with a little browning over in under 20
gauge that my dad got me and we've had great hunts over the years but this year
we're just not gonna be able to have that field so I decided this is the
perfect year to plant my own dove field and I'm gonna show you guys exactly how
we're gonna do it now we do deer hunt this field and usually the farmer that
tends this field plants either beans are wheat or something like that out here
now it is early May and when we came out here a couple weeks ago we had a really
nice surprise this entire field was planted with clover and I'll roll in a
picture of what it looked like it's just beautiful for those of you that don't
know clover is a great attractant for deer so what we decided to do and you
can probably see here behind me is we're gonna leave about 10 yards of this
clover all the way around the field so to still be feeding deer all year long
while also growing us a nice dove plot for the fall you know the two most
popular things to plant for dove is either wheat or sunflowers we decided
we're going to do both we're going to make a nice dove buffet out here so what
we're going to do is we're going to have a circle all the way around the outside
that we're just going to leave bare ground that we're gonna top so wheat on
later in the year a little closer to dove season and probably a strip right
down the middle that will top so we Don everything else is going to be
sunflowers sunflowers is one of the best things to attract dove and get a lot of
dove coming into your field but it has to be done right now I've done a lot of
research on this and I'm going to show you exactly how we're going to do it
first thing we did was we came in here and we mowed down the section in the
middle this field that we wanted to plant I
went over it twice make sure it's cut good and low then we sprayed Roundup
killed everything came back a week or two later spray it again we wanted to
get everything good and dead so that we can eliminate having any kind of weeds
or anything like that in our sunflower plot another thing I recommend for weed
control is making sure you get a good herbicide tolerant at sunflower we got
clear field sunflowers and there are certain types of herbicides that you can
spray directly on those without killing them so what we're gonna do is we'll
plant these sunflowers today and we'll come back in a couple months and we'll
spray down all the weeds that are growing back up in there and hopefully
keep this nice clean ground dove love to feed off the ground and they like a nice
clean ground to do it on so it's very important that you have no grass no
weeds or at least as few as possible in your sunflower plot so they can get down
on the ground run around and eat those seeds the reason that you want to plant
early in the year like I said this is early May and it's the perfect time to
plant some flowers for dove is because it takes about a hundred days for
sunflowers to mature and what we want is we want those sunflowers to grow and
then die a couple weeks before dove season dove season comes in around the
1st of September and we want those sunflowers to start dropping sunflower
seeds to die wilt over and start dropping sunflower seeds on the ground a
couple weeks before season starts and through the season so there's plenty of
seed on the ground for the dove to eat we're also going to come back in here
and just bush hog down large sections of the sunflowers too so we can knock all
that seed to the ground and scatter it around everywhere
but we also will leave some of the sunflowers standing for the Doug to come
in and land on now today is planting day it is May 8th so we're gonna come in
here today we're gonna till up this ground we're going to tilt it up nice
and fine so we can get the seed planted first I'm going to roll in some footage
for you guys of all the prep work we've done like I said we mowed we sprayed and
we did everything right hopefully to grow a nice good Duffield
now a lot of you are probably like me you don't have a lot of equipment to do
this with and you don't have to be a farmer to do this you don't have to have
tons of equipment I'll tell you what we did we have about an acre and a half
on this field and I came out here and sprayed the whole thing with backpack
sprayer no that's not the easiest way to do it I definitely missed a lot of spots
but that's why I came back and got them all the second time and that worked out
just fine and you're gonna need some kind of
tractor to do this now I borrowed my dad's tractor to do the mowing and
things like that we're gonna use that same tractor a pillar that we're
borrowing from my uncle to get the ground tilled but we don't have a
planter for the tractor I'll show you what we are using for that it's just a
manual push behind rows cedar I think it's gonna work out just fine for us and
obviously you're gonna need your seed some fertilizer and some herbicide and
other than that that's pretty much everything you're gonna need now I'm
gonna roll in some footage of the prep work we did we're gonna go ahead and get
the tiller out here and get this ground broke up and then we'll be back in just
a minute to show you how to plant this stuff
alright guys now here we are about a week and a half later and you can
probably already see behind me on my feet we already got some sunflowers
coming up so looks like we did a good job
everything seems to be coming up nice so there's no grass and weeds coming up in
it so we did a pretty good job there and I'm gonna get you in closer so you can
see what it looks like but before we do that I just want to mention a few things
to you so if you noticed in the video that you just saw we did end up going
back with a cultivator to kind of break this ground up a little bit more we just
happen to have a really hard ground a lot of rocks and stuff so the tiller by
itself just wasn't going to do it so we brought in the cultivator and then came
back over top it out with the tiller so if you do have a really hard ground a
ground that's never been broke up before that is something that you're probably
gonna have to do so keep that in mind when you're planning out your planting
the next thing I want to talk about is the way we planted it now like I said
before we didn't have a road planter for the tractor or anything like that saw we
used was this chapping manual Road planner now you can see in the video how
it works I'll roll in some more video of that but basically you just put your
seat in here in the little channel and it worked out fine I do want to warn you
though these things are primarily designed for gardens with really fine
loose soil so that thing can really just push through it real easy as you can see
in the video you can see every time I hit a rock or a big clump or something
that would kind of catch up on me and I'd really have to force it through
there we do have some areas of the field that I went through no problem but of
course if you're in a large field like this there's going to be some rocks
there's gonna be some large dirt clods and stuff like that that you're just
going to have to power through and you're just going to deal with that
unless you have some kind of tracker implementing that you can use now let me
get you in here real close I'm going to show you how this thing works real quick
and I will put a link to this in the description below if you want to get one
for yourself and use it to plan your dug field alright guys you can see a little
bit of our sunflower coming up right here but get a closer look at this thing
all you really need to do is you put your sunflower into this channel here it
does have a fill line so you don't want to fill it up above
that and it does come with a lot of these discs right here and this is
what's going to pick that seed up as that wheel turns just going to rotate
and it's going to pick that seed up and it's just going to drop it down into
this channel right here that drops it down here and right here where it's cut
your trench just going to drop the seed in right here and then it's going to
cover it back up with this spring-loaded flap right here that's just going to
pull that dirt back in over top of it this is adjustable so you can drop it
down to whatever depth you need for our sunflowers I just set it to an inch so
really an inch inch and a half anything in there is probably pretty good
obviously it's going to be relative to your soil and how hard you're pressing
into the ground and that kind of thing but it gets you close enough also this
back wheel here this large flat back wheel will kind of pack down that soil a
little bit on top to make sure it's planted well it does come with several
of these disks for different types of seed it does have one that is designated
for sunflowers so that worked out nice if you don't have a sunflower disc I
have heard that a disc for corn will work just as well the next thing you'll
see is this cut this arm right here at rotates from side to side and you could
probably see me doing it in the video but all this does is it marks the spot
for your next row so if you want your rows a certain distance apart and we did
we wanted our 30 inches apart so I put this wheel way out here at 30 inches
locked it down now as I push this thing and planted this road it was marking the
next row for me so all I had to do was move over to that spot and keep going
you know when you get down to your end of your row and you want to come back up
the other way you just transfer that thing over to the other side and it'll
mark your next row for you that thing's obviously not necessary you can eyeball
it if you want to but it's pretty convenient and at least gives you a good
starting point and that's how we did it guys it worked out really nice we got a
lot of sunflowers coming up here one thing I will mention I did notice that a
lot of times it would drop a couple seeds at a time or maybe it would drop
them closer together then I really on it I was kind of shooting for six to
ten inches apart on the seed and it didn't really get there there's some
places where there's six seeds dropped right next to each other and there are
some places where I got 10 inches so just be aware of that and what you can
do is go back later once they start to grow up and the ones that you can see
that are kind of stunted you can come in and just cut those out and that'll allow
those other nicer big ones to grow even bigger because you're taking away that
competition so will probably come in here and thin this out later of course
also the other thing we need to think about is that we do have a deer coming
into this field and once these once these plants start to get a little
taller the deer will start to eat on them a little bit so it's probably a
good thing that we kind of got a nice thick planting because the deer are
going to naturally thin out some of that for us and obviously once it gets to a
certain height the deer Engel mess with it anymore anyway so I think we're doing
good there one other thing that did happen to us a few days after the
planting we had a huge thunderstorm come through and yes I feel did need rain but
I'll tell you all what this storm dropped a gallon of water per foot I
guarantee it anyway we did have a lot of seed that
got kind of washed down into different areas washed down towards the bottom of
the field and that's not a big problem you can see here that we still got nice
rows going every 30 inches a row still looked really good so that's not gonna
be a problem there now while I'm talking here I'm gonna roll in a video of a
little bit closer view of these rows so you can see how that looks
overall guys we're really happy with the results it seems to be coming up good we
got a decent sized field here the whole field here the part that we cut out is
probably two and a half acres something like that and we planted about an acre
of sunflower like I said before we have a strip all the way around the outside
about ten yards wide that we left not planted that we're gonna top so we don't
lay Terr same thing down the middle so it worked out nice we actually ended up
with a little bit of seed leftover and we started with five pounds one thing I
might not have mentioned earlier is we did go in and we spread
10-10-10 fertilizer over the whole thing we did five bags of 10-10-10 over the
whole field before we tilled and that should really help these plants along
now I debated on whether or not I was gonna save this video till later in the
year and show y'all an update once these plants get a little bigger but I'm gonna
have to make you wait so stay tuned sometime late summer I'll come back give
you a update video and then of course we're gonna have to have a hunting video
in the fall once these sunflowers are nice and big we'll have some heads on
them about like that right there it's gonna be beautiful and we're gonna have
a million doves fly in here I just know it so stick with us guys like I said I'm
gonna put a link to some of these things in the description below if you want to
check it out if you like these kind of videos make sure you hit the subscribe
button down below and hit that notification bell so you get notified
every time we upload new videos and I really hope this videos helped you out
if you guys have been wanting to plant your own Duffield just didn't know how
to do it I think this is a good method I think we're really going to have
successful dove season this year and make sure you stay tuned for that update
video thanks for watching guys please like share and subscribe and I'll see
you next time