Hey everyone, now that planting and turkey season is over and it’s time to play a little catch-up. With that said, let’s get right into what has been going on around my place since the end of March.
Last week, ¾ of the white pines I outlined in my management plan were planted. I estimated that I would need 3,200 trees but ended up with 3,000 (ordered an uncounted pallet). The quantity I ordered ended up being short by roughly 1,000 trees. Because the core spots were planted, I will fill in the remainder I want next spring. To give you an idea on the costs of doing this, the total cost for the trees and hiring a forester to store, water and plant the stock ran me just under $1100.
The first round of the TSI (Timber Stand Improvement) was also completed. While I had some small thickets, what I had was not really was sufficient to hold any number of deer once everything died off in the dead of winter. Much of the wooded areas were mature popular and maple which wasn’t doing the deer much of anything. The North side of my property contains four bedding locations that I wanted to really enhance this year because of this. New growth around the bedding areas and in other select areas would allow enough sunlight to reach the forest floor to increase the native forage and bedding cover.
I also buried two 40 gallon farm tanks and back filled them adding a nice water source between the bedding and feeding areas where I expect the deer to stage up in the evening. The result of all this is to make my place a spot where they never feel the need to leave throughout the year.
The last major task was to break ground and get the food plots planted. This was a real learning experience and something we’ll follow up in more detail with the upcoming posts. What I want to do first is show you my property from the dead of winter and follow up in the next post with what it looks like after the spring green up and we’ll check again after it’s in mid-summer form.
What I’ll do below is provide as many property angles as possible with a short description so you can tie them it into the photos from the previous post that show the mile high view of my place. My hope is that this will help you to be able to visualize what is going on at my place and why I decided to do certain things in certain locations.
The view right from a bucks bed on sumac hill below my house
Looking back up into the buck’s bedding area
The full view of the hill
A future stand of big blue stem and/or switchgrass
To the North of the last pic, to be filled in with pines
Heading North from the last pic, this area is also filled in with white pine
The cattail creek bottom across the road
The East cental portion of my property. Not much is going on here other than to extend the pine stand out
The North East section. This is where the NE plot is located (right of the mature pines) and where I filled in the bottom up to the mature trees with white pine
Looking back at the East end to the South. I had 3-4 rows of white pine put in along the mature pines to increase the amount of winter thermal cover I have
A few doe beds along the North strip of pines
More beds in the North pine strip
Just below the North pine strip. You can see how the native grasses and weeds fill in nicely
This is just below the North central ridge finger (Just North of “J” on the last post). We’re looking at a buck bed right here
A few from the buck’s bed. You cannot see them all in this photo, there was about a dozen rubs just outside this bed
Heading out the other side of the bed
Looking down into the bed. You can see it is stil kind of open so what we did here was hinge cut some top and back cover while allowing some light to get in and thicken it up
The top of the North central finger. We did a lot of TSI here to turn this into what I hope is a good bedding area
Looking West on the North End. As you can see, this is way too open here. It looks much different in here already!
A doe & young buck bedding area looking up (Just North of the water hole “E” from the previous post). We did a lot of TSI here to improve the holding power of this spot
Another bedding knob just NW of the last picture
A view East from the NW finger
The view looking along the NW ridge finger. We did most of the TSI back in here
A couple beds right where we did the TSI on top of the ridge. There are a bunch of white oaks along the top that I hope will start producing more acrons in the future
Looking West from the NW finger. TSI was done along here as well
One more shot looking North
A view of the field just out from water hole “E”. It still looks like this here with the food plot 35 yds to the East
The top field looking East as it used to look
Looking back West and I am standing about where the main food plot now ends. To the left of the pic I have a white pine row planted and this is where I started to fill the area in with cedars. My goal was to create a nice soft edge for the deer to trasition in and out of from bedding to feeding.
Top field, pre-foodplot
Looking South from the top field. This area will be filled in with tall native grasses in the future.
On the East end of the top field. This is all food plot now.
Looking back towards the North Central finger. This is where “J” is on the previous post. This was already a nice bedding pocket so we jsut did a few cuttings around it to make it even better.
Top of the ridge, looking East just above my driveway
A little closer to my drive way with a view of the North pine strip. Right where the first pines are in the pic on the left is where another buck bed is.
I will end with a preview of what is to come. This is the top field just after a little mowing and a few runs with the Ground Hog Max .
The next post will follow the how, what, why and when of my planting process.
Time to go, I have trout in the frying pan…
Hey I was wondering if you have contact info for the buffalo county lease?
sent ya an email with Shawn’s email so he can get that info to ya.