|
Rolla, ND | I personally would favor off to the side, but it has nothing to do with the fertilizer directly. It's because I don't think you can make as good of an environment for that seed disturbing the soil directly below the seed to put fertilizer there. You'd have to open the soil, put most of the soil back, pack the soil then place the seed on the packed soil then cover the seed and pack. I don't know any system that does that.
And if it's a bit too wet you just placed the seed in one big smear, and if a bit dry you probably just fluffed it all up so the seed will have trouble germinating.
I prefer to place the seed on soil that has had at least some time to settle, and then the fertilizer off to the side, hopefully not too far.
I doubt that a perennial grass will see much of a pop up effect from starter.
It seems to me with a perennial grass, you are mostly trying to get a large amount of fertilizer into the soil to be taken back up over a fairly long period of time. There would be some band effect but over much of the life of that stand, the band effect will probably not be great.
I also haven't studied root growth in perennials due to the presence of fertilizer. A wheat plant grows more roots in the area of a band, that's part of the reason it works as well as it does with wheat. Some other plants don't respond that way. I honestly don't know if the perennial grasses do or don't proliferate roots in the area of a band. They have a lot of root mass and since they are alive and growing even in the cool moist weather of fall and spring they tend to be good at taking up phosphate even from right at the surface, so depth isn't as big of an issue, though a little depth so that there is a longer period of takeup can't be bad.
Biggest thing about a small seeded grass is that seedbed. Whatever I did to get the fertilizer in the ground the number one concern of mine would actually be not screwing up the seedbed.
Marv | |
|
Starter fertilizer placement questions.
