Before you start analyzing potential sites give this some thought.
If possible, pick a spot that’s close to a deer bedding area, like a swamp or creek bottom. Make sure prominent wind direction is favorable for hunting, regarding the routes deer should use between bedding areas and the plot. Consider, too, where stands or shooting houses will be located to “cover” plots, and the paths hunters use to access stands. Ideally, wind will be in a hunter’s face on stand, and his path to a stand will not be crossed by deer coming to the plot.
In determining whether to have summer or winter food plots, or both, remember that maximum summer nutrition is what grows antlers, and healthy fawns from rich doe milk produces prime whitetail herds. Winter food plots maintain quality animals, too, but more importantly, draw them into the open.
In some heavily forested regions, trees may be cut down and cleared for food plots. On much hunting property, however, cleared areas already exist. The edges of clear-cuts by timber companies are ideal for planting “green strips.” Even better are power and gas pipelines. Old, wide logging roads and firebreaks can also be used for planting. Woods lanes and firebreaks, however, can have too much timber canopy that reduces sunlight and limits potential for lush, maximum-producing, whitetail-drawing plants. Also, woods roads usually have very acidic soil from decaying plant sooner, so they require additional liming and fertilizing.
If you’re going to create your own food plot in the woods, and you’ve found the best location for it, take time to design the perfect site for hunting. Irregularly shaped plots, with lots of winding “edge-cover” adjacent to woodlands, but with no “blind-spots” like extended points of timber or pockets in the woods provided ideal locations.
Some sportsmen like long, narrow plots just 20 or 30 yards wide because they tend to make bucks feel safe by not being too far from timber cover. Some hunters cut long, narrow food plots shaped like a “V” or “L,” and place stands where the two lines of the “V” or the “L” join. For bow hunters, such shaped food plots are good, but keep them small, so deer stepping out into cultivation are well within arrow range.
On bigger food plots, sometimes leaving a large oak tree or two in the middle of a field makes sense for stand placement. Oaks in such spots also tend to produce lots of acorns from fertilizing and liming, and can be outstanding archery stands. Sometimes, having a wide lane or two leading to the field creates a natural travel path for deer coming to the site—a choice ambush setup for bowmen.
Some sportsmen who like to still-hunt design special “S” or snake-shaped woods lanes as food plots. They plant lanes for hundreds of yards, and during the season they slip-hunt into the wind, hiding behind turns and dips in the lane to spot bucks around the next bend or behind a slight rise in the terrain. Property that has long, winding woods roads or old logging lanes can be easily made into such prime still-hunt food plots. Hunters in some premier whitetail states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan create miles of food plots on public, county-owned forests. They till, fertilize and seed old logging roads from ATVs, then bowhunt select spots during the open season.
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