Deer Food Plots in the Woods are the most popular habitat improvement I have in my arsenal. However, food plots aren’t always necessary and they can often cause problems for your hunting success.
In this article I will discuss creating deer food plots in the woods and the plan to create the best fall food plots for deer starting from scratch.
Deer Food Plots in the Woods offer an enormous attraction potential for both deer and turkeys. They have to potential, when large enough and productive enough to increase deer weights, antler size, numbers and taste of the meat. One thing that is not often talked about is the great improvement in the flavor of venison when the deer you harvest has been on highly nutritious feed all year.
However, landowners must take into consideration factors like food plot location, what other forage is available in the area and when, how the land is accessed and hunted and how the neighbors hunt and/or plant their food plots.
Location
Locating your food plot is the first step in creating a good one. As stated above, you must consider how you access your hunting land, where the best or the least crappy soil is and whether or not you will hunt near it or if the neighbors will have access to deer that come to it.
Some questions to ask yourself are: how much hunting pressure is there around the location, will I spook deer off the plot while accessing the property for hunting, will I be trapping myself in the stand in the evening by locating it here, will I be able to access the stand site without deer knowing I approached, is the wind swirling around the woods opening, carrying my scent around the field?
The number one question is where is the best soil? The effort involved should not be wasted on very poor sites. If you have no suitable sites for forage, it may be better to work on your woody browse and fruit bearing trees and shrubs. I have been on properties where growing quality forage is almost impossible due to the extremely poor soil. I have remedies for that but this is an article about doing food plots on a low budget. There is plenty of info on this blog and youtube channel about improvement of soils to get forage to grow.
Once you’ve figured out this is where my food plot should go and this is why it should go there, and that I can access this food plot, maybe even hunt it occasionally there are some easy steps that you can follow to put in a food plot this year with not a lot of equipment.
Create and Prep the Site for a Deer Food Plot in the Woods
The very best and easiest way to get a spot cleared is to have a timber sale and get the loggers to make a big landing and keep it cleared of woody debris. You can put this into the timber sale contract or pay the guy hourly for extra dozer work. You can apply the lime you surely will need any time and let it get pounded in by the equipment. Make sure they don’t scrape off all your topsoil/organic layer.
If you don’t have a logging job, you can do your own clearing. If you are lucky, there may be an existing opening that has grown up with brush, grass or small trees that can be cleared by hand.
Consider the amount of sunlight you will get and make sure you have the canopy cleared so that the low angle of the sun in fall will still get 4 hours of direct sunlight. At the QDMA Deer Steward II training test, a question I got wrong was which direction should you orient a linear food plot? Their answer was East to West. This is incorrect. If you were located at the Equator, that would be great, but the sun is located in the southern half of the sky in the Fall. I point my food plots to the south and make the North end wider like a sort of pie shape to capture as much sunlight as possible during the time when the sun is low in the sky. Imaging a 100 ft. pine tree casting a shadow on the ground through the hours of 10 and 2. This is the most efficient shape. Make sure you have reduced canopy to get at least 4 hours of sunlight onto your forage.
Once I know that that area’s open and there’s sunlight, then you’re completing that first step in a wooded setting. In a non-wooded setting, an old field or idle Ag land that hadn’t been used for many years this is where our food plot’s going to go. If someone had cleared it of trees and rocks 200 years ago, it must be able to grow forage. In this case you need to get it cleared and exposed soil in the spring, then use multiple herbicide applications to kill off the existing vegetation.
Once Spring green up takes place on either one of those food plot areas, either you’ve opened it up in the woods with a chainsaw or you’ve just simply done nothing because it’s open pasture land, what you do next is to spray it with a mixture of one pint 2,4-D, per acre, and two quarts per acre of glyphosate, mixing those together and spraying those approximately when the weeds are actively growing. In that food plot where there are warm season weeds like foxtail and thistle, you will need an early summer and a late summer application. DO NOT use 2,4-D in a second application. If you have a lot of broadleaf weeds, use 2,4-D B or also know as Butyrac. This is a less soil-active formulation. You need some time to go by before you can plant after a 2,4-D application.
Do not wait until those weeds are two feet high, three feet high, because by spraying early you’re eliminating future weed debris that will prohibit your seeds from getting good seed to soil contact. That first Spring application is very important so you dont end up with a lot of dead growth standing and, assuming you don’t have a tractor any heavy tillage equipment and you dont want to burn, you will have trouble getting seed/soil contact. The second application of glyphosate will kill the weeds that germinated after you killed the competition from the first application. It would be a mistake to plant right after the first one as the stuff you plant will have a hard time competing with the native weeds that may already be in seedling stage when you put your seed down.
If you have an ATV and a 25 gallon sprayer you can spray two acres with that, and so then you’re adding enough chemicals within that tank to spray two acres. It’s working backwards, I like that because then you figure out when you’re typically on a boom behind the ATV and you’re driving about seven to eight miles an hour and you’re going to get enough coverage in that 25 gallon tank to kill two acres. I’m adding two acres worth of chemicals which would be four quarts per acre of glyphosate and two pints per acre of 2,4-D. That should get you a good burn down.
In mid-June, I’m going back into that area and you should still have weeds. The weeds are your number one problem here, and I hope you recognize that. I’d rather not spray but I want to have week-free, efficient plots, and you get seed on the soil. If you don’t spray, unless you have the big earth working equipment or an expensive drill then you’re just not going to get those food plot conditions and growth that you want. I’m spraying that first time in early May typically. Mid-June I’m following up just with two quarts per acre of glyphosate and going a lot faster.
You don’t have to spray as much on the ground because you don’t have a lot of weeds and you’re starting to see your soil open up and be exposed and ready to accept seed. I’m spraying in June, it’s a low weed growth. A lot of times your broad leafs are hidden by grass in the initial growth and I’m killing those broad leafs with that second spraying. You may even have to spend all of one season and into the following spring to get the site clear of competing vegetation. Once you get your own plants established, it will become a lot easier to apply herbicides.
If you are planting clover, one quart per acre of glyphosate, something pretty light, and then I’m spraying that amount on there so that I’m eliminating 99% of all weeds and not killing the clover. This should be done in the hot weather. Using 1 Qt of glyphosate with 8 oz of Clethodim will take care of your grass and broadleaf weeds in clover. You may want to look into Raptor herbicide as well. If thistles persist of blow in from a neighbor, you need to make sure they never make seed. Cut the flowers off with a weed whacker if you have to. It’s a really great practice, easy to do, and so very, very effective on eliminating your weeds with just three sprays applications – early May, mid-June, end of July, and in those sprayings those weeds are gone. The whole idea with that is you’ve now opened up your soil and you’ve got great soil exposure so that you can simply throw your seed on top of the soil.
After I’ve eliminated all weed competition for a new plot, then simply hand spreading the brassica seed onto those plots, onto the top of the soil, and I’m leaving them alone. No drag, no light drag, no disc, no cultipacking, just throwing down on the soil. If there is a rainy week ahead, get out your spreader bag and plant some brassicas and clover. The brassicas will be a big draw by hunting season and the clover should come on in spring. It takes 3 years to develop a good stand of clover.
Once you spray and that chemical has dried on the weeds, you’ve killed it so you don’t have to wait 24 hours after rain, a half hour, we sprayed in light rain and had great effect. I’m actually spreading that brassica the same day that I’m spraying at the end of the July, early August, I’m timing that spraying with my brassica. You’ll find at that point you have 90% of the soil exposed, there’s very little weeds. Because you sprayed initially early in early May then that seed will go down to the soil and you’ll have great germination rates. I’m not even fertilizing at that time, believe it or not.
Again, we were building this for efficiency and for high quality food plots, and high quality success rate with planting the right seeds, spreading the right seed, and getting it onto soil. That’s August first, end of July, when you see the rain. If you don’t see rain coming in the forecast for two weeks then I’d wait two weeks. Wait until you see it coming, but I wouldn’t plant past the second week of August, third week of August, right along in there. coming back four weeks later. At that four week mark, my brassica should be four, eight inches tall, should germinate within that first week or two. A lot of times you’ll find that brassica will germinate just with the morning dew and the change in the temperatures and the moisture that’s in the air. Then I’m planting oats and rye, and that’s it on the other half of the plot so at that time four to eight inches of brassica on this side and then I’m putting oats and rye on the other side. Oats and rye will grow great without working in the soil too much, especially the winter rye, rye grain, not rye grass. You can use wheat too in a pinch, I just like rye better because it’s less soil discriminate. It doesn’t matter if the pH is lower, the rye will take off where the wheat won’t.
After a month of growth or when the brassicas are several inches tall, hit the plot with some urea Nitrogen fertilizer. This will boost the growth and palatability of the plants.
I’m expecting that nitrogen to work for the middle growth cycle of that brassica where it’s going to put on the most inches, get the most volume. That’s a very easy planting recipe. You’re spraying early May, spraying early June, you already have these open food plot areas. You’re spraying the end of July, at the same time you’re planting the brassica seed, the spray, the round up will not hurt your seed. Again, I’m only using 2,4-D in that first spray because 2,4-D has a residual in the ground for about two, three weeks, and you don’t need it in the other sprayings either.
Then apply some oats, rye and wheat into the plot to get more green into winter and early spring. If I see that the brassica didn’t catch, if the brassica was consumed right away because you have too many deer on the land, then I’m adding 200 lbs. of rye per acre over the brassica. I’m putting 100 lbs. of rye and 100 lbs. of oats on the other side four weeks after the brassica is planted. Then, when I get into the end of September, early October, I’m planting another 100 lbs. of rye, if it’s needed, on the rye and oat side. the brassica has been drowned out or they’ve been over browsed, they didn’t grow for whatever reason, then I’m adding another 100 lbs. of rye on the brassica. If you have some good ATV equipment, just a light drag and a cultipacker, then I would add 100 lbs. of peas to the oats and rye at that time. You can even disc in 100 lbs. of peas at the same time you plant your brassica on the other half of the plot. Now you’re lightly discing in the peas, 100 lbs. per acre, you’re not working the earth too much, you’re bringing up more weeds and then you’re running it over the cultipacker, your ATV tires, I use my truck tires, car tires, as a cultipacker. Those peas have to be set into the soil and covered with soil at least lightly.
If this sounds like a lot of work to you then you are better off not doing anything. You can mow and fertilize an old field and get some benefit from native forbs. You can cut maple in late winter to get buds down to eat and resprouting instead.
For lots more info on this subject, look for other articles in this blog and check out the youtube channel.
