For as great as cereal rye is, don’t plant it alone. Instead, try mixing three parts of our Fall-Winter-Spring blend and one of Lights Out Forage Oats. The oats are a slightly better early-season draw. To get the maximum from the soil building and weed control, go with a heavy seed rate. When planting as a stand-alone crop, go 150-200 pounds per acre of the 3:1 mix of the Fall-Winter-Spring and Lights Out Forage Oats blends. Due to how ridiculously easy cereal rye is to grow and its tremendous soil-building qualities, it’s almost always the planting of choice for the first two to four years of a new plot’s life. When transforming meadows, CRP fields, and other previously unbroken ground, including clearing plots in the woods, planting cereal rye in the first few years helps build the soils to the point where more delicate crops can then follow. Planting at a higher rate also helps take advantage of cereal rye’s abilities to allelopathically suppress weed growth by releasing its form of herbicide. At the same time, the cereal rye offers the impressive ability to create physical barriers that the weeds can’t get through. In all, it’s a fantastic choice for new plots with seed banks of weeds and grasses just waiting to take over the plot. The other primary use for the 3:1 mix of Fall-Winter-Spring and Lights Out Forage Oats is top seeding into other plantings, specifically corn, soybeans, and brassicas. As the corn and beans start to turn colors, walk down the rows with a hand seeder, tossing about 100 pounds per acre of the 3:1 mix on top of the dirt. For the brassicas, wait until they grow 4-6 inches tall and top seed at the same rate into them. Because cereal rye germinates easily, you can consistently, successfully get away with merely throwing the seeds on top of the dirt into those annual plantings. That said, it’s always a good idea to top seed before a day-long soaking rain shower. The beauty of this method is multifaceted. We are getting both the soil-building and weed-control benefits of cereal rye. At the same time, we’re jacking up the tonnages of food production from the plot. As deer consume our initial planting, the cereal rye fills in the gaps, continuing to feed them. Finally, it adds a diverse food offering to the plot. If you must choose just one planting for food plots, make it cereal rye. What more could you truly want when you add its abilities to draw in deer, feed them during their most critical periods, and do wonders for the soil? It even works great to let it grow all the following summer, spray it in fall, top seed more of the mix into the old plot, and drag last year’s cereal rye down flat. Do that, and you can cut way down on seed, as last year’s crop will also germinate. Categories: Education
