re: new duck property

The pink smart weed is great natural food. You can fertilize it and it'll run strong

Duck potato hasn't been a huge draw on my place for ducks. I usually kill it and plant rice.

You can mow down both right before flooding which has benefits vs planting.

Its also not too late to mow and disk a section and spray 24d. Get moist soil grasses like sprangle top and barnyard millet to come up. Fertilize that when it is coming up decent and it'll be carpet thick

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Pennsylvania Smartweed is good, lady’s thumb is good and pale smartweed is good. If it was me I would save the money and just make openings/ strips as soon as you have majority hard seed. Bushhog and disk or rice stubble roller.

If you have gotten permission from NRCS to thin the trees, then it must be an older “WRP”. I am guessing there are “micro topographic” holes the NRC created and they hardly ever dry out and that is why you have the Duck Potato. Is it only in the holes?

Monocultures of smartweed tell me they pulled the water off all at once in mid-late March. Why? Did they normally plant a millet/rice instead of managing moist soil? Were they not happy with their duck hunting, and that is why they sold? It might be worth trying something different if they weren’t happy with their duck hunting.

There is still a bunch of ducks in that area. I am only 30 miles NE of Panther. You might not kill thousands, but I think we went hunting 32 times last year and averaged 4.3 ducks a gun. We mainly chase mallards though. Of those numbers, we only shot 19 wood ducks and 4 shovelers. If we were strictly trying to kill numbers we could have shot way more of those 2 species.

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My understanding is nobody hunted it last year. It is older, has some big cotton wood etc on it.

Corn and beans will go in next spring, but this year we will try a little of everything to see what it holds

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Any moist soil plants I can still broadcast that will come up for this year? Or anyone have a moist soil blend they recommend

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Is this an Alt Account or a different person? If it is WRE in old Catfish ponds the Natural seed bank is all you need. That goes for probably 90% of the time.

The only place I have seen where it wasn’t was a WRE that went on ground that had been in cotton for the vast majority of the 1900’s and might have went under water 3 times in that timeframe. Even then after one season of deep tillage, millet, flooding, duck use, I could tell a difference in the moist soil plants starting to become more abundant.

What do you mean by “moist soil plants”? Are you talking about millets?
Jap-60 day
Golden-60 day
Browntop- 60 day (doesn’t like wet feet/saturated soils like the others)
Chiwapa-120 day.
*those are ~ days and I have seen some millets make seeds even in 40 days, just not as much and not as much bio-mass. Just hope you don’t catch an early frost.

If you are referring to native moist soil plants, I haven’t bought any in over a decade. High dollar shite. It was for Ag Research and how test chemicals would control those and other specific “weeds”.

Mossy oak sales a mix or 2, but i don’t know anyone that has tried them. I personally wouldn’t buy them and wouldn’t even waste my time if they were given to me. Someone might have experience with it and love it though.

Where are you located, or is this the same property? Depending on location you might be able to just disk and native late season grasses come up just fine.
Or use a 60day millet.
Or use what is there naturally.
Natural Moist Soil and invertebrates, if the ground is already holding them/get started by plant matter to soil contact and adding water.
*invertebrates seem to be somewhat forgotten by the vast majority of hunters*.

Hate to sound like a biologist on this, but it just depends on location, drainage and what is already there.

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How close are you to Panther?

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So the main part of Panther we are 5 miles north of it, there is a small section north of the main part of Panther, we are about a mile or so from it.

I have not heard of Double B or Po Boy in our area