However, even with a lack of immediate growth, I excpected the deer to immediately begin relating to the switchgrass planting following the discing. Deer will love the tender winter wheat as it grows. The more clues that you learn will help you make adjustments to your hunting strategy and habitat improvements. Bonus Read: 7 Ways to Kill Bigger Deer on Small Properties, Photo credit: Bruce MacQueen/Shutterstock. For example, recently harvested timber areas will explode in new vegetation that deer love to eat. Unfortunately, there are a lot of factors that influence this. As I eluded to in the previous slide, its important to encourage deer to bed close to food and water. The switchgrass planting was recommended to my client by someone who has had great luck in a large agricultural settings located in Southern MI, where switchgrass can sometimes be an adequate bedding option. Improved antler growth. Even though that Northern MI bedding creation wasn't appropriately matched to the conditions, there were still very good reasons to use switchgrass plantings on the property. Do not attempt to establish these grasses unless the planting site is completely free of live vegetation! It provides both food and bedding cover. Our club decided to plant Conceal in several locations mostly for bedding areas closer to our plots. Finally, the last slide included screening illustrations of each habitat and hunting feature, with the word "EVERYTHING", in bold text across the top of the picture. Real Worlds Clover & Chicory mix makes a good firebreak and also offers the deer a travel corridor and place to feed just outside of their bedding sanctuary. Trees will die and rot once they get so old managing your timber is just as important as managing wildlife. RUGGED POLYETHYLENE MATERIAL - Made of rugged polyethylene material that makes . However, one of my favorites is Switchgrass. A great idea that I had never considered. As I mentioned before, some bedding areas offer lots of food for deer to eat within the bedding area itself. Bonus Read:Declining Deer Numbers Lead to Public Land Hunting Reduction. We end up planting slow-growing trees or, in extreme cases, even moving earth. Note- RWWS Whitetail Bedding Mix may be used on some CRP (conservation reserve program) projects. Your goal should always be to hide deer within ther preferred hotspots of food and cover, and a switchgrass planting is a great way to accomplish a very high quality screen. Our club has planted Whitetail Institute products for 16 years and we've always had great luck. Small game, whitetails and game birds are in desperate need of quality cool season cover. Now when you grow tall grasses and shrubs to hide you from the deer, you should be aware that these covers should be there in different seasons and weathers. If this sounds like the ticket for you, all you need is to haul a bunch of brush, downed trees, limbs, branches, etc. Either way, you have come to the right place. It helps to choose a location deer already use or where there is already at least a little cover. The number of potential uses for Conceal deer cover seeds are limited only by your imagination. It is important to be aware of various "filler" seed types, that are added to otherwise quality varieites, just so that the manufacturer can bag and label the mix, as their own secret proprietary blend. Thats part of the natural cycle of life. Photo credit: Michael Tatman/Shutterstock. It probably is not a shock that the most common long term deer screening cover plantings are conifers, including: *White Pine*Red Cedar*White and Norway Spruce (determined by soil and shade tolerances)*Shrubs and fast growing trees such as hybrid poplar can also be an outstanding choice for long term deer screening cover varieties. Sometimes bedding areas have lots of food for deer within them, and some bedding areas offer no food at all. However, as you move closer to full-cover regions, that is not the case. Using prescribed fire can be done every year or on a three-year rotation. It also can act as a screening cover to allow you to access and leave your hunting stand locations. These grasses respond very well to fire. It is important to keep in mind exactly how your deer screening cover will appear during the months of the hunting season. Need to quickly provide tall, thick cover for you and/or your deer? -how many days does it take to fully mature? This blend has been tested and tested again . This will only help both the deer and deer hunting. We wanted to plant barricade on the edge of our property that lines the road to keep people from being able to see into our fields driving by. Copyright 20 Hunting Bow Lab For example if you are attempting to screening a food plot, a great planting recipe will often include 1 each of short, mid and long term planting products. While some conifers such as Red or Scotch Pine can lose their lower branches early in life, effective long term screening plantings do not. Egyptian Wheat can be a great form of short term screening cover! Here are 5 strategies that you should be using your food plots for, to determine where the deer actually bed on your land. Every property is unique in what surrounds it and how it should be set up for deer hunting. If you dont have a water source within or near your bedding area then add a waterhole in a strategic location where you can hunt over it. Good luck! When the cover that you create fails when all critters need it the most -including deer- it's time to find something else. Luckily, you dont need to in order to see the same effect. *Designing and creating high quality diversity bedding pockets is just a fraction of what WHS can do for you! Every year I try new setups on my farm, Just follow the directions and it works. For example, if there are a lot of wooded bedding areas but very few switchgrass fields, the switchgrass field might offer something different that the deer prefer in that area. The best part about this is in most cases, if going through a government agency, there will be little to no cost when getting their advice. HIGH PROTEIN/HIGH ENERGY Late/Post Season Annual, No Till/ Minimum Till Clover Perennial/Annual, Use to block views/secure walk-in routes, funnel deer, Fast to establish; plant in summer, lasts into winter. To make sure that you are on track with your bedding cover planting and habitat strategy, check out, "The Most Important Cover for Whitetails". When you combine Switchgrass with the other forms of viable whitetail cover not only can you create outstanding diversity, but you can create outstanding year round cover diversity, that can be used to attract, hold and expand wildlife populations. Maintenance It is not necessary to fertilize these grasses. Best Shrubs for Deer Cover Witch Alder This one is a south-eastern shrub and is known for growing very slowly. Deer feed 5 times in a 24 hour period, including twice during the daytime bedding hours. Now, whenever shrubs and tall grasses grow in the right area they turn into cover and bedding areas. This type of grass usually occurs from mid-summer to late spring. If you can discover places where humans arent pressuring deer, or pressuring them less frequently, you will have better odds of success hunting those locations. In my experience most deer and wildlife do not like the typical grain sorghums as a food source. It usually only grows 3 feet tall. Managing for predators will significantly increase how comfortable deer are inhabiting a given area. DETAILS. The timing for frost seeding would typically take place at least 4 weeks prior to the typical Spring green-up in your area. You can also mow the plot to help with weeds but do not mow lower than 12. For an outstanding source for shrubs and FAS growing trees, check outBig Rock Trees. Would you like to find out where an old monarch typically likes to hide? Before they had to walk about 1/2 mile from their bedding areas to get to the plots and it was near or after dark before they made it. A bedding area can also be different just by the amount of human pressure that it sees or food that it has close by. 1. Like any plant, these grasses will grow better in more fertile soils. Barricade is one of the best products I have used with Antler King. Kelly's Deer Bedding Mix. Advertisement Why? Through a series of slides, I used a combination of satellite photos with illustrations, in attempt to answer 1 important question on the very first slide, that read, "What Should You Screen?" Screening various interior islands or lines within a food plot is another great way to reduce the stress among the local deer population. These grasses will not establish well in areas with lots of shade or when in competition with other vegetation. Im trying to shoot the biggest buck I can, and I know that my odds of seeing a mature buck is much better within cover than in an open field like a food plot. We will only be offering this product in one and three acre bags. Its important to strategically place entrances into and exits out of bedding areas. Mature buck hunting, herd and habitat techniques. If you want to learn more about my strategies for accessing a deer bedding area, read my article called Should you enter a deer sanctuary. This blend contains a total of 6.25# PLS (pure live seed) per acre. Make sure to click that link and read that article before deciding where to put your bedding area. Plants are 10 feet tall and standing up to our winter in Wisconsin with several inches of snow on the ground. This unique mix stays green all season and beyond to provide deer with much needed winter energy, plus up to 20% protein for bucks to grow next years rack! Deer will gravitate to areas that offer the best food at particular times of year. The cookie settings on this website are set to 'allow all cookies' to give you the very best experience. A properly Spring-planted switchgrass field can be used as a high quality form of deer bedding cover structure in 15 months or less. If you can install a screen to hide your movements, that will reduce the likelihood of deer getting spooked out of the bedding are. You should also aim to create a mono-culture which should be a combination of: Your must have at least 3 of them, but the more the better. For some areas it has even reached 8 to 10 feet which means more width as well. From one slide to the next, several habitat and hunting related features were continually added to the progression of the slides, including: Deer beds, deer bedding areas, food plots, woodlines, hunter parking areas, access routes and stand locations. Fields that have previously been in other crops are perfect for no-till planting of this mix. Without structure, cover for wildlife lacks the level of consistent quality to build and maintain viable populations. Slow, light burns will just remove whats on the forest floor. Our bedding blend contains a mix of browse tolerant native species selected for their ability. For example, how many bedding areas there are available to deer, how much food is in the area, how small/big the deer population is, how much hunting pressure is in the area, and the list goes on. Very pleased with Conceal. Think about which sides deer will want to remain open based on typical wind directions, direction of approach, direction of departure, etc. But this is in this list because the moment it blooms, it extends another 2 to 3 feet and provide excellent cover for deers. This one has a really broad distribution that varies in color and height based on where its planted. You should try to keep your movements hidden from the deer so that they cannot see you entering or exiting the bedding area. Bonus Read: 3 Ways to Hold More Deer on Your Land. If you are a landowner, create bedding areas that are different from your neighbors and make sure your bedding areas fit in with the rest of your habitat improvements. 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