They do like clean farming in one sense, Mike. If the ground under the sunflowers, or corn, etc. is free of heavy and thick grasses they are much more likely to "take to" the field. Doves have short little legs and really like the ground fairly clean where they land. We used to have a weed in the cotton fields named wooly croton, or dove weed, as we called it. Roundup has about gotten rid of it, but for many, many years we had some good shoots in the middle of cotton fields as the doves flew down into the cotton to feed on the croton seeds. You dern sure better watch where he fell, though. A dog couldn't see over the cotton to mark him down, and it was mighty easy to lose them.
tw, the kind we plant are the black oil type. They are very small, much smaller than the big striped ones you buy to eat as a snack. I used to grow them both, one for oil and the other for snack market, but the markets dried up around here for them. Now, we just plant them for the doves to snack on. Keeping the fields clean of weeds and grasses is the biggest task we have in being successful with a field. Palmer amaranth, a pigweed, is a terrible problem and costs us $25 an acre to control in the sunflowers.
I'll say a bit more about the seed we use in the next installment, showing the planting operation.
Glad there's some interest in all this. It's fun for me, too.
All my best, SRH
