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?

No one does food plots here or QDMA or anything?

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

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.

I am excited about saifion.

Just bought 50 pounds of seed

Oats with some arrow leaf and crimson clover.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Oats and winter wheat

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.

Turkey also like a good food plot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you have any cover? That will keep them.

Wheat and oats in the winter

Plenty of cover...some really thick stuff too. If the cover keeps them too good, will need something to get them out in the open.

Here is my dunstan chestnuts getting potted yesterday.

I just had my first dunstan produce nuts this year.

Brassicas have always been good plots to hunt over late fall. Three years ago I tried winter rye as a hunting plot and had good results. I think the best bang for the buck is a clover chicory mix. Good year round grazing, with some attraction still up into late November. The OP claims to be from the same area as I’m from, let’s see if this guy is a sock puppet.

I agree about the red clover

It seems to draw them in.

For a number of years, I planted various clover types in strips so I could try to monitor preference. I really like red clover. However, a couple times now, I’ve seen deer dig through a foot of snow to get to white clover and ignore red clover that was thicker and mere feet away. I gather from those observations that their is probably a nutrient difference that the deer were particularly in need of. I now mix whites and reds whenever I plant.

I like to plant a mixture of white and red clover. But my neighbors land has a strip of shaded red clover they are always munching on in early September. I.E . The clovers always greener on the other side!

Ended up with 48 chestnut, 29 swamp white oak,5 filbert ( in one pot), 66 sawtooth oak, 3 paw paw.
The smaller cooler has some more filbert and paw paw seeds. I will monitor for germination and plant them if they sprout.

Deer here love sunflowers in the summer. Particularly when the bloom starts to form, and makes what I call a dog knot. You think that they are about to bloom and then all that is there is a stem. Early fall Daikon radish seems to be the favorite, until acorns start to fall. miles

That's a nice mix.
I have a handful of sawtooth producing along with about 3 dozen English oaks. My best English trees drop over 2 months, which is a great draw.
I've got about a dozen other oak varieties planted, but they aren't old enough yet to produce.

How old does the sawtooth need to be to get acorns?

How about the English?

Both were about 7-8 years. They're about 18 years old now.
I put them in 5' treepro tubes for the first few years.
I've also planted: chestnut oak, white, red, pin, swamp white, bur, swamp chestnut, turkey, burenglish, shuettes, beadles, sauls, nuttall, shumard, and a shumard/northern red hybrid.
Just remembered, the chestnut oak has produced twice now in 18 years.
Along with about a dozen dunstan, I do have a 30' tall straight American chestnut that's beautiful. I hope to pollinate it with the genetically engineered chestnut they're working on.
The dunstans don't do well for me. They are multi-stemmed and die off alot.
This year will likely be the last year I plant oaks. Moving on to Apple varieties.
Wish there were a "habitat improvement " forum on here.

I've got a handful of English acorns I could send you.

I have had good luck with winter rye. I have a good plot of clover and try several other things when the weather is favorable. When the bed is ready for fall but the rain doesn't come, winter rye has saved the day several times. It germinates and grows fast. It grows at lower temperatures then most other stuff and frost don't bother it. Deer and elk love it. Just make sure its cereal rye and not rye grass.

In the alfalfa fields near me if they use nurse oats on the new seeding the elk are thick in that field and will often linger well after sun up.

Of course recipes vary by region. I am in NE PA so similar to you in NY. I have planted many things over the years but decided to simplify about 4 years ago. I settled on a red/ white clover mix and drill in winter wheat every fall along with some more of the clover mix. Fertilize twice a year and 1500 lb of lime per acre every 4-5 years. Works as good as the other stuff I used to put in and one heck of a lot less work, fuel and wear and tear on the tractors and implements. My advice, get a no till drill and just sew the mix I stated above.

And set aside a "sanctuary" chunk of your land adjacent to the food plot, at least 10 acres if you have it. Stay out of it and keep others out of it. Will do as much for you as the food plots. Drop trees etc and let the brush come up in it.

Very good advice IMO

I am lucky I live around tree huggers that prohibit hunting.

When I first moved here they would come to my scent, ( the deer) and in the moonligh walk towards my bow being hoisted up to the stand……..

Them days are gone 😂

Best foodplot where I live is alfalfa. Buddies dad had 10 acres. You could drive by at night and it looked like a city. Couple hundred deer in it. They ate it down to sticks though. Wheat is practical and grows anywhere and draws deer in.

Soy beans planted late so they’re still green for bow season. Corn for cold weather.

Other plots have wheat, oats, radish, turnips and whatever else I find to mix in. I’m far enough south I’ve never seen them eat the turnips…. Doubt I’ll plant them again. But my dad lives further north and they eat the heck out of his turnips.

I’ve planted a bunch of oaks and fruit trees but they’re not producing yet.