April Food Plot Update

Apple Trees

Mineral Licks

Our Latest Digital Scouting Camera

April should be a big planting month for us but the weather has not cooperated. We went from hard and dry to muddy very quickly and didn’t get to do everything that we wanted to do. Maybe the weather will be more favorable in the first couple of weeks in May.

Corn Patch Food Plot

We started disking the new improved and expanded corn patch plot on April 15th. Before we could disk we had to brush hog and pull out some old fence posts with the John Deere but we made quick work of them. This plot will end up about three times the size that it originally was.

It has been a very wet the last few months but the days prior to the 15th had been dry. Amazingly the ground was so dry and hard that I couldn’t get it to disk up well enough to plant. I hoped that some rain would arrive over the coming days and soften it up a bit. Since we usually have some problems with grass competition anyway I didn’t want to start this plot out with grass still there.

You know how that usually goes. We got rain and plenty of it. The following Saturday it rained so hard we couldn’t do a thing and on Sunday we had three inches of snow. It then proceeded to be a very wet week. We gave it a go on the 29th and it was still so wet and muddy that the tractor just wanted to slide around. It felt like me the tractor and the disks were all going to slide over the hill.

Hopefully next week it will dry out a little and we can get it worked up and plant the clover. I’ll plant it this spring even if it’s a little late. I’m thinking that it’s better late than never.

This is the expanded plot. You can see my help trying to get away in the background.

Whippoorwill Food Plot

We limed and fertilized the plot on the 15th and disked it up on the 16th. Since this is very good dirt and has been planted several other times it worked up real good with little disking. We went ahead and planted it with the Imperial Whitetail Extreme that we had left from last fall.

Once the Extreme gets started we’ll put some PlotSaver around it to see if we can let it get a good start. This is a very small plot and usually gets hit real hard. I’m thinking about trying one of the perennials here if the Extreme doesn’t work out. We’ll wait and see.

This is the Whippoorwill plot after we had sowed the Extreme. The dirt worked up real nice.

Garden Food Plot

The deer spent a lot of time in this plot ever since it was planted last spring and it has looked real bad through the winter. Much of it is just bare dirt and there is some grass. This will be a test for the Whitetail Clover. On the 29th we used some Arrest on the grass to try to get rid of the competition.

Arrest is a grass killer from the Whitetail Institute. Hopefully it will help keep our plots form being overcome with grass.

I’ll probably try some PlotSaver on this plot as well to try to let some of the clover get established again.

You can see that there is still a lot of brown in the plot and much of the green is grass.

Middle Clearing Food Plot

The deer just about cleaned up this whole plot once they started eating it last fall. The difference is easily seen inside of the exclusion cage. They hammered it right after the PlotSaver hit it’s four week deadline for effectiveness. There is a lot of bare dirt in the plot so the Extreme has to do some catching up.

We put the Plotsaver back up on the 15th and sprayed it both on the 15th and 29th. I had a camera set up watching it for the two weeks in between and did get one picture with a gobbler strutting inside of the PlotSaver. I guess when you are trying to impress the ladies you’ll go anywhere.

On the 29th we also sprayed some Arrest on the grass that has come up with the Extreme.

This plot is still the most impressive. The clover has jumped up and looks real good and a look into the exclusion cage tells us that it is being used. There is some grass that started to grow last year so we spot sprayed some Arrest on the grassy areas to see if we can knock it out.

We left one of our digital scouting cameras on the plot to see if we can catch some of the deer that are eating the clover.

We were hoping to get all of our planting done in April and overseed some of our older plots with some of the clover seed but this didn’t happen. Hopefully we can do this in early May. The overseeding is much needed in the garden and middle food plots since they are so thin. We also have some lime and fertilizer that I would like to get onto the older plots to keep them healthy and growing. I guess that there is just never enough time.

We have a few apple trees on out property that the deer can’t leave alone when the apples are dropping. I think they wait down in the woods and can hear them when they drop and hit the ground. Since these trees are starting to get some years on them we thought that we had better get some more started.

In our attempt to give the deer everything that they could ask for we planted two out near the oldhouse food plot. The now have clover, minerals, a feeder and apple trees there. There is an old apple tree in the woods that we daylighted last year. I checked it yesterday and it has bloomed this year. We’ll see how it does this year.

You can read more of our apple tree experiences at the deer and apples page.

Minerals

On the 15th we put out some Imperial Whitetail 30-06 vitamin and mineral supplement in our mineral licks. Two weeks later you could easily tell that the deer had used them. Our neighbor had been near one of them while turkey hunting and said that he had seen deer using one of them a good bit. Deer seem to naturally use mineral licks a lot during the spring.

I bought our 30-06 supplement at Cabela’s.

Since that last issue of The Food Plot Journal I purchased a Bushnell Trailscout to test. This week I received my first full two weeks of pictures and will be reviewing them and updating the review. It’s been fun testing the cameras but it is getting expensive. I’ll have to start selling them after I’m done testing them so I can get another one. E-mail me if you would like to take one of them off of my hands.

I’ve now tested four cameras and you can read the comparisons at the game camera review page.

Below is a picture from the Bushnell we downloaded this week.