Fall 2012 Food Plot Update

A Favorite Picture

The Legend Lives On?

Welcome to the Fall 2012 Food Plot Journal.

We had a dry summer followed by rain in late summer/early fall. This made it tough on our clover plots, but the rain in the early fall allowed them to pop back somewhat and give the deer some nice green clover. This allowed us to see them in the hayfield plots and even do a little bowhunting in the field.

The down side was that our clover plots are pretty poor as of this writing in mid-November.

This has been one of the worst food plot years we've had in quite a while. The weather was tough on our established plots and those that we started either floundered or downright failed.

We were finally able to get our John Deere to the oldhouse food plot and mow it in mid-September, but the two trees that fell into it are still there except for a little firewood we got from them. There is still some clover here and we see deer eating, but this plot needs a lot of work.

After a failed middle food plot planting of Biologic Maximum in May we tried again in September. On September 15th we limed, fertilized and planted again. This is a little late, but we were used to failing this year. The brassica grew thin, almost six inches tall and as of mid-November the deer hadn't hit it hard. I watched a couple deer eat a little on Nov 20th, but the deer haven't eaten it like they have in the past.

Our Whippoorwill, Right of Way and Old Garden plots are struggling.

The plots in the Hayfield are doing a little bit of everything. Our best clover is the Monster Mix in Area 5. It still looks nice and we've seen a lot of deer eating in it this fall. The section of Area 2 we planted in Imperial Whitetail clover and Area 6 we planted in Monster Mix are right behind, both showing a good bit of clover. The remainder of Area 2 gave us fits this year. We planted clover here twice and it is still mostly grass at this point. The rest of the hayfield plots are rough. There is still some clover but they are mostly grass. We need to try to get more clover in the hayfield in the spring.

We have our work cut out for us next year. Observation tells us that the size of our bucks antlers vary with the success of and the amount of clover in our hayfield plots.

We still have two trees in the oldhouse plot, the middle plot will need something planted after our fall brassica fiasco and we don't have much clover in the rest of our plots. We need to get an early start, have great weather and have plenty of time to get everything done we need to get done.

Now that the season is winding down and it's getting colder I'm looking forward to spring and getting started in our food plots.

We get thousands of pictures each month with our digital trail cameras but we narrow down each set of pictures to our favorite six or seven and these are usually buck pictures. As you can imagine there are always several more that are very good but don't make the cut.

Below is one of our favorite pictures from October. One of the good things about putting cameras in our field is that we sometimes get real interesting pictures of the sky. This is one of the best from this fall. You can take a look at our favorite deer pictures from November here.

After taking One Eye out in bow season we saw the end of a legend on our property. We'd been watching this buck for four years and we'd been calling him one eye since he lost sight in his right eye late in the 2010 season. This year he seemed to get his dominance back but hadn't added much antler size in the past two years. We figure this buck was at least 6 ½ years old.

This week we found that we again have a one eye buck. A young buck with antlers that are less than an inch long showed up in our pictures with one eye badly damaged. Pictures and sightings later in the week showed that he was opening his damaged eye, so he may heal. We may again have a one eye buck to watch and we may watch this one from a little fellow on. The legend lives on.

Take a look at the new legend.