Early Season Bowhunts

Had some great time in the treestand already this year. It's been a beautiful fall and really a rewarding feeling to sit in a stand over a food plot that you put a lot of hours into with your own hands. I'll admit a sense of pride when I watched a couple deer feeding in the plot.

Had an amazing night on Sunday with dad and Dan Dummer. Setup on the edge of a CRP field between two beanfields. Had seven year and half old bucks file out and spend about an hour sparring out in front of me. All within bow range at some point. There was one tremendous buck that came to the edge of the woods, but didn't step out. All those young bucks scattered towards dusk leaving me to think that the big boy was coming out. But never showed. Dan sat in a ground blind in the middle of all this too. Dad had great action around him too with two 10-point shooters running around him.

Really a great night and gets me really jacked for the next month or so of being out.

Food Plot Photos

Boy, it's been a while since I have had the opportunity to blog what's happening in this part of my world. The food plot has been okay, but not great. The soil was really resistant to growth and weeds have been an issue. I think over the next couple years that I can get the soil more fertile and acceptant to my planting. I have a couple spots where the clover has done well enough to keep deer traffic coming and going. These are a few great photos of a couple bucks I have watched. Needless to say, I am anxious to get out in the stand now in a couple weeks.

Food Plot - Planting 1

I have had the opportunity to get out the past couple evenings and get some seed in the ground on the food plot. What a good feeling to use your hands and hopefully see this growing process happen over the coming months. Cameron and I first went out in Maring's big John Deere tractor with the digger and worked the ground up a little more. We went home and got the four wheeler with the cultipacker and headed back out to roll the ground some. After doing that, I planted about 1/2 acre of Antler King's Red Zone. This was in the northwest corner of the field. Cultipacked again on top of it and rode home.

Yesterday, Cameron and I went out and planted 14 test plots with a variety of Antler King and Whitetail Institute products. This was again about a total of 1/2 acre. We'll see what come of those different seeds and what I might do different next year from the results.

The best part of the planting came at 9:15 last night when I went back out to cultipack that plot and then planted another 1/2 acre of Whitetail Institute's Double Cross. It was just getting dark and it was so quiet out there. It really made me think ahead to this fall and hopefully a lot of quiet evenings will be had sitting on the edge of the plot watching deer.

Food Plot - Lime

In order to raise the pH level a bit on the soil, I had Al Hernke come by today with his lime truck. The pH is about 5.7 currently and ideally it would be around 7 which is perfectly neutral. Al spread about 10 ton on about 3.5 acres for me today.

It was really neat how the grass had started to grow back a bit now after our burn. Still very desolate, but it will grow quickly now with the good rains we've had.

My plan is to disc the field good a couple times in the coming days and then dig it to smooth out the soil a bit before planting. I would like to have some seed in the ground by next weekend.

Food Plot Creation 1

Got started with the initial field work on the food plot this weekend. I spent part of the day Friday prepping the 11 acres of CRP/switchgrass to be burned. I went in with a brushhog behind the tractor and mowed down two rows of grass and Phil came behind me with the chisel plow to create a firewall for the burn. The chisel

plowing is also a good start on getting some of the initial ground turned over for planting.

Then on Saturday AM we went over and burned. It was a quite a sight to see the power of fire and how quickly it gets its work done. We started on the downwind corner to create a back fire. This slowly burned into the wind and created a barrier for the upwind fire to burn and die into. Once the upwind fire was started the 11 acres was down in minutes. When the two fires met each other it was quite a powerful updraft. I'm sure they fed off each other in some fashion.

As quickly as it was started the show was over. I also realized that this was the easiest way to shed hunt! Flattened black earth that only minutes prior was 5-6 feet tall! It was amazing that under the torched grass there was already green shoots starting to pop up. Amazing how the spring does this to the earth. This left a nice patch to be disced, dug, rolled, planted and rolled again. Should be some fun.