LAST UPDATED: May 8th, 2015
That’s the plan anyway. This is my first year of serious food plotting in the spring and summer months. I planted a couple of plots last fall and saw just how effective they can be. Now I am trying to model my plots after what Mark and Terry Drury do, trying to position the deer where I want them in hunting circumstances.
The theory is that you can make the deer use your plots in a manner than allows you to position stands in areas where the deer will funnel thru and give you close range shots. This can be achieved by planting taller crops in the middle of the plot and shorter crops around the outside. The deer will like to move along the outside edge of the taller crop closer to the edge of the field and your stand.
Positioning of stands is critical when hunting around food plots. There will likely be many deer in the field at one time in different locations. What I like to do is pick a spot where I don’t think deer will enter the field and hang a stand there with food out in front of me. Then I hunt that stand with the wind blowing from the field into the woods behind me. Hopefully the deer will enter the field from another location and feed my direction and end up in front of me never having gotten downwind of my stand. By setting up opposite of where the deer enter the field, you can let the does walk by and wait for the buck to enter. If he is watching from back in the woods a ways and sees the does feeding unalarmed he just might come out a little earlier.
I feel by having year round food plots planted the deer will be used to feeding on my property and I won’t have to try and draw them away from farm fields once the season starts. If I can keep the bedded and feeding on my property during daylight hours there is a good chance that I will see them during hunting hours and the neighbors will be headed home by the time the deer make it to their property.
Right now I have a mixture of crops planted to give them a real variety that way there will always be something growing that the deer will be looking for. I have clover and a clover chickory mix planted in one section of my field.
Clover looking good.
Clover chickory mix getting tall.
In the middle of the clover I planted some corn, using the taller and shorter plan to push the deer to the outside edge of the field.
Some of the corn.
I also have a few seed mixes planted, Biologic Hot Spot is a mix of Wheat, Peas, and Buckwheat. If you haven’t planted Buckwheat before, you need to give it a try. My deer love it and it grows very fast and it grows very well in just about any soil.
Biologic: Hot Spot mostly Buckwheat.
Antler King: Red Zone is a mix of Peas, Soybeans, Buckwheat and sunflowers.
Antler King: Red Zone has been nipped.
Evolved Harvest: Maximize is a mix of Soybeans, Sorgum, Peas and Sunflowers. This stuff is all growing well in my plots and the deer have certainly found it.
Evolved Harvest: Mazimize, lots of Sunflowers.
Fresh shoots are nipped off everywhere in the field. So if all goes as planned I will be harvesting a few deer from the seeds I planted this spring.
