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Spring and Fall favorite plantings for deer food plots. What have you seen most productive for over all health and best plots for harvesting deer over?

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No one does food plots here or QDMA or anything?

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I plant as much as I can and as many variety of crops as I can at several different times of the season. My experience is that deer like whatever taste good at the time. And sometimes only for a couple days. So hopefully they like it on a weekend when I can be there. I plant small patches different sizes depending on the crop and wedge them towards the blinds. With all that said I plant
Corn
Soybeans (I plant soys through/with everything else below)planting every 3-4 weeks from spring to end of July
Chicory later summer
Clovers (couple varieties) later summer
Alfalfa
Radishes later summer
Turnips (couple varieties) later summer
Sugar beets spring

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What's the hurry?

For myself, my early plots have a mix of various clovers, alfalfa, and perennial grasses. I'm big into little effort and low cost. I try to add brassicas in the spring and then again in the fall if I am so inclined and have some spare money.

Fall foods are brush and shrubs rather than grasses and forbes. The former are available throughout the winter as they stick above the snow unlike grass and Forbes which will be buried under better than a foot of snow. These are what the deer are able to digest as the stomach enzymes change from grass based forage to browse in the fall.

Hunting "plots" are either harvested corn fields or clearcuts depending on the area I'm hunting. I mostly hunt travel routes between food and bedding areas as that seems to lessen the odds of the deer going nocturnal by being disturbed.

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I am excited about saifion.

Just bought 50 pounds of seed


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Oats with some arrow leaf and crimson clover.
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This one has oats, clover, radish and turnip.


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This one has wheat and ryegrass added to the oats, turnip radish and clovers.


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Diversity in plant types is key. Not just different species but different types such as legumes, brassicas, small grains etc. When possible keep a food source year round and not just during the fall. Clover is a great summer food plot, I like it mixed with buckwheat and sorghum or Millet before panting a fall plot. If you want longer maturing varieties like corn then consider strips. Lots of options out there and they vary with locale. Stop in at your local conservation office and they can get you on the right track


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All of the above are good suggestions. I don’t bother to plant spring/summer plots as the deer have plenty of native browse to keep them full.

The past few years I have focused on establishing clover food plots consisting of medium red clover and ladino and other white clovers. I mow them twice a year and overseed in the fall and again in later winter feb/march, similar to a cool season lawn. Seems to be the most bang for the buck, and at this latitude with mild winters, the clover provides 12 month forage. I do not till the soil, just broadcast seed and spray clethodim to manage fescue/orchard/crabgrass. I also don’t worry about broadleaf weeds in the clover because they will either kill at first frost, or they are things deer like like ragweed etc.

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I use BuckBusters with success for fall/winter and add more Austrian snow peas and radishes to it.

Then switch to purple hull peas and joint vetch for spring/summer.

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Originally Posted by Colorado1135
Diversity in plant types is key. Not just different species but different types such as legumes, brassicas, small grains etc. When possible keep a food source year round and not just during the fall. Clover is a great summer food plot, I like it mixed with buckwheat and sorghum or Millet before panting a fall plot. If you want longer maturing varieties like corn then consider strips. Lots of options out there and they vary with locale. Stop in at your local conservation office and they can get you on the right track
I need to get better about that first sentence. Main plot is only 2yrs old, so soybeans have been great early and have allowed me to get a handle on the weeds (namely Johnsongrass). That said, I need to get better at adding more diversity into an overseeding. This year I was crunched for time/resources so it was oats. Worked well, but petered out earlier than I liked. Turkey's are still hammering it.

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Corn, brassica, chicory...
Apple and pear orchard also


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Oats and winter wheat


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Clover, buckwheat and oats here, but I focus more on early successional habit. Every year I go through my woods and will either girdle a few junk trees, or drop them if they're good firewood. New growth explodes once sunlight hits the ground. In the larger pockets I'll plant an oak or 3. I start a couple hundred acorns every year for this.
This years plan is to fill my foodplot with apple trees.

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Turkey also like a good food plot.


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I've finally settled on a mix of Buck Forage Oats and turnips. We're in a pretty good spot with our farm, good mix of open ground and wooded cover in the middle of more open pasture and farmed ground. For the past several years, this combo has been a great attractant and excellent food source for the deer around here.


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This year I planted a mix of clover, chickory, oats and peas. Our deer didn’t touch it. I am sure they will hammer it in February though. Too many acorns and browse or other patterns I suppose. The deer would literally walk through the fields without stopping. Not much on camera at night either.

We hold a lot of deer in the summer with beans and corn and then lose them as soon as they pick. I planted about 8-acres worth of fields in various locations in an effort to tweak their patterns. Didn’t help. I plan to give them 3 seasons before I make a decision on it.

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We plant 17 acres of food plots. Typically, 4-5 acres of a corn soybean mix, 4-5 acres of brassicas (I change up mixes for different planting dates, but my preferred is a mix of Winfred and rutabagas) and the balance is a mix of winter rye/ triticale and oats together with a mix of medium red clover, ladino clover and chicory. Thus, I’m planting bean/corn late May/early June, brassicas in late July or early August, and grain/clover/chicory Labor Day weekend. I find the variety is treated like a buffet which promotes movement. In October, the grains are top draw. As snows pile up and makes the grains harder to access, preference turns to brassicas and corn. The soybeans planted with our corn do not last long but permit the corn to mature. Contrary to many reports, our deer utilize the brassicas we plant very early. Indeed, without all our other plantings, they’d be wiped out before Thanksgiving.

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I have 40 acres in NE WI, between Green Bay and Sturgeon Bay. We're surrounded by big agriculture, dairy farms, commercial grower farms. Not long on the property and making plans for a food plot or 2. When all the crops are in around us, the deer are all over the place and the property is really active. After harvesting of the crops... crickets or hardly any use. So, I need something for post harvest, and big enough, to keep em coming to the property. Just starting to look into this and appreciate this thread.


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Do you have any cover? That will keep them.

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