Well, to say that bow season for me was horrible would be the understatement of the year. I scouted, and planned and hunted hard. I saw big bucks, nothing ever close enough for a shot and then had all the deer that I was seeing, harvested on the neighbor’s farm. The biggest deer they shot was 180 inches, with two others in the mid 140′s. How could there be that many nice deer around and them not be on our farm? Two words, food and cover. Our big piece of land butts up to a very large swamp. We own some of it, however the majority of it we don’t. The deer would pass through our farm but didn’t really ever stay, so after I swore off deer hunting forever last fall, I decided to create an environment that the deer would use and be inclined to stay on our land…
The New Food Plot After Initial Clearing
The border of the swamp was very overgrown and while it was good cover provided minimal food resources. So this February I decided to clear the brush back and make a small clearing between the fence row and the edge of the swamp, well I may have gotten a little carried away and ended up with almost an acre inside the woods, this area has now been cleared and worked up and is awaiting seed, what is being planted has not yet been decided. We also worked up the buffer strip that borders the woods and swamp, this is almost 4 acres of land that will soon be planted in Trophy Clover mix.
Since good things take time, we also decided to plant more trees, this piece of land has almost 1000 pines and spruces already planted and growing tall, but each year I like to plant a few more, so there are 50 more pines ready to go in as soon as this snow disappears. The 6 new apple trees went in before this snow hit, it will take them a few years to start producing fruit, but when they do Opie and Tex will be fighting over who gets to hunt “holy crap that is a big deer” corner!
The moral is that if you do not like the type of deer you land is holding, get out there and change it. There are many resources out there that will help you improve the quality of deer on your land. The main things that they need are food, cover and water. If you have these the deer will have no reason to leave your land, unless they are in the back of a Ford.
PT