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Any experience with DOVE plots?

S

stevep

Member
I'm looking to plant some food for the doves this year, and hopefully bag a few birds on my own property. I've got about an acre and a half area that I'm going to plant. I have 10# of Peredovic Sunflowers and 10# of Proso Dove Millet. Originally I was going to try and get a drill, but I might not be able to work that out.

Does anyone have any experience broadcasting these 2 seeds? I was kinda thinking I would just broadcast all of them over the entire area and see if it would all just grow up a big mess of dove food. Or would I be better off keeping them in separate areas. Will one out-compete the other? My plan was to broadcast the sunflower seeds, cultipack, broadcast the millet seeds, cultipack again. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Steve
 
I am not sure about mixing the two seeds, but I did plant a sunflower plot two years ago with the idea of bagging some doves myself...the problem...the goldfinches found it first. And I don't mean a few goldfinches, I am talking about a swarm of them.

All of the sunflowers were barren of any seeds by the time the dove season opened...so no doves for me. It was though a beautiful sight to flush the literally hundreds of yellow goldfinches out of the patch and watch them fly away. It looked like someone took a bucket of yellow paint and threw it across the sky, so there is that. :D

Pros on sunflowers...they are easy to grow and very drought tolerant, something that cannot be over-emphasized with the summers we have been having lately.

I disked the ground pretty well, drug it smooth with a drag behind an ATV and then simply broadcast the sunflower seed over the bare ground. My seed was simple-simon, a 20# generic bag from the grain elevator. I don't remember fertilizing this plot, but I may have. I then drug the seedbed one more time to bury the seed some and then cultipacked it to firm things up. They grew super at first, but then there was no rain for a few months so they slowed down of course.

I still had a pretty field of 5'ish foot tall sunflowers, I suspect that they would have been 6'-7' with some rain though. But then the finches annihilated the field in mid-to-late August and I then mowed it down and planted it to winter rye that fall, when it again didn't rain! So I had a pretty bare, ahem, food plot there that winter.
 
No experience planting the plots but anything with a high amount if seeds will draw them in. We shot a bunch off sunflowers last year and also a lot out of our wetland reserve grasses.
 
I did about 1 1/2 acres of proso millet the first year of Iowa dove since by the time they got the season passed I was too late to get sunflower started. It worked fairly well broadcast. I mowed it about 10 days before season opened and shot some dove. I've done sunflower the past 2 years and think they do better. I wouldn't do them together. I would be afraid that the millet will either out compete the sunflower early or the sunflower will shade out the millet. If you can get someone to plant the sunflower with corn heads in a grain planter that works well. It doesn't take very much seed & it's easy to overplant. Weed control is critical early on. Pre-emergent work well. You need to plant early enough that the heads have matured by mid-August. Then mow down a large portion of them to scatter seed on the ground for the dove. They prefer to feed on pretty bare ground. Deer will eat some of the plants early & songbirds will eat a lot of seeds on the heads but I've never failed to have plenty for a couple of good dove shoots before the birds head south. That reminds me; I think I have a package in the freezer that I was saving for a spicy treat (Atomic Buffalo Turds) on a cold winter day. Might need to run to the grocery store & get some jalapenos...;) Good luck.
 
I dont know how well it would grow down here but canola i better than any sunflower out there for attracting doves...we used to hunt them religiously up in nodak and never one time did we hunt a sunflower field always hunted canola...they love the stuff
 
Doves like bare ground and seeds. Burned wheat fields, brush cut sunflowers field, annual weed fields also work great.
 
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