Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals better dear hunting, present it by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go farther, stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you but First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about the realities of planting a kill plot from clost whitetail owners. Most of you listeners probably know the feeling of being young and driving a beat up truck or a car, and maybe pulling into a gas station to fuel up, and then having someone pull in next to you with a
brand new ride. You look at your rusted out, hand me down truck and think, man, it'd be nice to have that, because you're not thinking about the payments or the maintenance or anything other than just owning it. That feeling of jealousy. That's kind of how I felt when I started seeing hunting shows where they were hunting over food plots. The idea putting in a little field of
greenery just for the deer. I was crazy and It made me super jealous, because, after all, it really looked like the answer to a lot of my deer hunting problems. Probably does to you too, if you've never planned one. The truth is, food plots aren't really a magic bullet. They are worth it if you have the ground and the means. That's what this episode is all about, And honestly, it's really mostly about planning tiny kill plots, not four
acre beautifully groom destination plots. So even if you will never have a two hundred thousand dollars John Deer should probably listen up. Anyway. Have you ever watched somebody tie a fly? It looks so easy. See them pick up a hook, often a ridiculously small hook, but it doesn't have to be Now, place the hook in a vice so that the hookshank is horizontal, scattered around that vice. If they are like me or I don't know, probably
organized around the vice like surgeon's tools. If you're like Mark, you'll see all kinds of interesting tools and bags of feathers and thread and tiny scissors, all kinds of highly specific things that should help you create something that looks like a bug or a minnow or a helgramite or something that would probably be found on the menu of a trout's favorite restaurant. Now, the first step, it's usually just to wind some thread on the hookshank. Maybe that's
black thread or green or brown thread. Maybe it's a full rap all the way down the shank of the hook, or a partil wrap just near the islet with slow rotations of the tool. You know, that holds the thread in place and allows the fly tire to keep things nice and tight. You know, it looks pretty simple so far, you know. Then they might pinch off some fuzzyal and work it onto the thread. This dubbing then gets wrapped around the shank to produce what would essentially be like
the insect's body. After that, the fun begins. Maybe it involves carefully measuring out a pinch of elk or deer hair, the kind of hair that is naturally buoyant because it's hollow and also happens to allow a dry fly to float. This hair, it'll get held along the dubbing and wrapped over and over with a thread. Once that's finished, that little patch of hair is secured on top of the dubbing, the miniature scissors come out. You do your best great
clips impression and snip the hair off evenly. Now the fly has a body, you know, a main body, and what looks like some kind of wings, probably if you have an iq of one and are looking up through the water column of a fast moving stream at it. Anyway, Then after that comes the hackle, you know, the dried skin, complete with the feathers of a wildly colored chicken or maybe a rooster pheasant in the hundreds and hundreds of
feathers on any small patch of that. You'll pluck out a perfectly sized option for just this size of fly and rub away some of the feathers, those fuzzy little feathers at the stem of the individual feather, and then hold it to the body of the fly near the head.
A few thread wraps later, and you can grab another specialized tool that looks kind of like, I don't know, like a tiny pair of tongs you'd create if you were a veterinarian and had to help like a hamster sized critter give birth like a particularly difficult berth, by getting a hold of the youngster during the process and yanking it out. I know that's a weird visual, but bear with me. Here with that baby hamster pulling tool.
You'd spin that feather around the fly and watch as it separates wrap by wrap to make it look like it has been hit with a heavy dose of static electricity. If the deer hair kind of looks like folded wings, this hackle, when done right, must look like the outstretch twings, maybe the legs a little bit too of a small flying insect. A few more wraps with a thread, and maybe a tiny doll up of glue, and then a few specialized knots to keep the whole thing from unwinding,
and it's done. You have a cats fly, easy peasy lemon squeeze. You think, since, well, it looks so easy from the casual observer's perspective, but in reality, it takes a lot of practice and going through a lot of really shitty flies to get to that point. You know what else is a hell of a lot harder to do than it looks. Golf, probably, but also creating a decent kill plot that will actually grow and produce something
the deer will consistently eat. You know how I know this because I was not put on earth to grow stuff. I don't think anyone in my family was. To be honest, we can barely keep the heartiest of plants alive and have been known to kill a few cacti in my day, which brings up the Dimitri Martin joke about being less nurturing than a desert. Well, that's what we are. But I have messed around with food plots quite a bit, and I know a few things about making kill plots,
mostly from the things I've done wrong. It has been a slow process, but I have managed to get some clover to grow and some moats. My little girls have managed to shoot a few deer in these plots, which is pretty satisfying. The process really is pretty simple, like tying flies, but there's a lot of nuance to it. And the best thing you can do before clearing ground and starting the process, as long as you have a place to do it, is to ask yourself if you
really need a kill plot. If you hunt around tons of agfields in Iowa or Illinois or somewhere, it might be a hell of a lot of squeeze for very little practical juice. That's not to say it isn't worth it still, because there's more to planning and maintaining a food plot than just killing deer in it, but it's
worth thinking about now. If you're in the northern Wisconsin woods, or maybe the mountains of Pennsylvania or some other region that is heavy on timber but light on destination food sources, a kill plot might be one hell of a good idea. Giving the deer something they don't have easy access to is kind of a no brainer, like putting a pond in where water sources are scarce, or hinge cutting the crap out of some trees in an area where food
is plentiful but betting cover is rare. The thing is, no matter where you might want to put a food plot in, you'll want to get your soil tested.
First.
I thought this was stupid, and I told a good buddy of mine just that when we bought a small property together in twenty thirteen. The soil, I said, you know, it looks as black as the soil in southeastern Minnesota where the crop yields are real high, and so I figured we didn't need to test it. My buddy, who can fix anything and that makes me really jealous, said you can't tell anything by looking at soil. He was right,
of course. It's kind of like a different friend of mine telling me very recently that the Golden Retriever puppy he ordered has a dad that looks like a dog he owned twenty years ago, and since that dog was a good pheasant hunter, some crazy esthetic transcendent properties will come into play and the new puppies should be a rooster flushing machine. That's not really how it works, unfortunately. Anyway, get your soil tested. Follow the instructions so you do
it right. You want to know the pH a your soil. You know what the soil consists of for organic matter. You want to know what the fertilizer recommendations are from the pros. This is like the instruction booklet sort of for how to build a little deer buffet. Starts with the soil. Y'all also want to eyeball your plot just to see how much sunlight it'll get. Sun is real important to plants since it delivers tiny little packets of
energy called photons. Plants need these. And while you might think about putting a kill plot in on a logging road in the timber and then just using some kind of shady seed mix, that's a tough one in my experience. Without a decent amount of sunlight throughout the first months of the growing season, just going to be in trouble quite a bit. I mean, I find myself cutting down shrubs and trees around my kill plots every spring in the interest of keeping the sunlight in and the shade out.
I also find myself fighting weeds a lot, and you will too if you march into the woods and start clearing out an eighth of an acre to plant some clover or something. The soil just about anywhere, but especially in the woods is going to be ripe with seeds of all kinds. It's just waiting for the canopy to open up and so it can sprout all kinds of undesirable grasses and weeds and other plants. This is a lesson just about every food plot first time or learns.
How you deal with this is up to you. I once wrote an article for Outdoor News about spraying a small food plot with roundup to kill it off, and you'd have sworn. I advocated drowning Labrador Retriever puppies just for fun, while simultaneously kicking toddlers in the face with steel toed boots, also for fun. I guess the people who got super mad at me conveniently ignored the widespread use of the herbicide and many others by people working thousands of acres of land and producing the food that
the world eats. Kind Of like how anti hunters focus on us being just horrible people because of what we do to animals, but not really focusing on the general public and their appetite for m pigs and cows and chickens and stuff. And you know the factory farming that goes along with feeding a population of billions and all the bad stuff there. Any huski, maybe you have to clear out and till up your spot and then spray it or burn it or do something cast a curse
on it. I don't know, Harry Potter. That shit the weeds, they're going to be an issue every year. This is especially true if you're making an elbow grease food plot and don't have any real equipment besides what amounts to sweat equity and manual labors. First timers opt for a seed blend to start with as well, figuring that if I don't know, we like a variety in our diet,
why not the deer? Also? Why not give all kinds of edible plants the chance to grow instead of one type that might be susceptible to drought or too much rain or whatever. Listen. Results vary, of course, but my experience in this realm is that my seed blend plots become an awful lot like weed blend plots. That's a dad joke for you guys. I find it's easier to pick something that should grow in my world and should
be appealing to deer almost the entire season. That rules out the blends, but also some of the stuff like brassicas and other food plot plants that might be more beneficial as the season gets later and later and later. Personally, I want something the deer will eat in September, October, and at least early November. That's just me, though you do yours according to what your hunting strategies are and
where you live and what your soil's like. Now. I also like planning perennials, which means it's going to come back year after a year without receding. This leads me right back to clover typically because the deer love it. It's pretty hardy, and a good planning will last me up to about five years. Because even my clover plots are so, so I will also throw in a handful of oats, usually in August. Oats will damn near grow on pavement if they get a little rain, so this
is like an insurance policy in case my clover sucks. Plus, where I have kill plots, good deer food is pretty hard to come by, so even oats, especially fresh oats that haven't headed out yet, pretty attractive. This is sort of my go to from year to year. Now I do spend quite a bit of time eat spring, hauling in bags of lime and sometimes fertilizer. It's like my soil is always in need of a pH boost that line provides, and it's always in need of the extra
juicy juice that fertilizer provides. I've learned all of this through trial and error. In the places where I can mess with a plot, you're gonna have to find your own way. But if I could offer up general advice, it would be to stick to the instructions and keep things simple. The simpler you go, the easier it is to figure out your problems and remedy them. I'd also advise this keep your expectations in check. My absolute favorite part about putting in kill plots is putting in kill plots.
It's fun to get your hands dirty and clear out a little spot for the deer. It's fun to watch the forecast and cross your fingers and realize that you have a bet a deer munchi's growing out there that you did yourself. What's not fun, at least for me personally, is hunting over a plot. I don't know why, and it's not to say I don't, because sometimes I do. But I get far far more enjoyment out of work in the land, getting something to grow, and then going
to hunt somewhere else. I do, as I mentioned earlier, love taking my daughters out to a kill plot when I know at least a few year have been using it somewhat consistently. And I do love to see the grouse and the bunnies show up too, and occasionally bears. Black bears eat a lot of different stuff, being the not too picky omnivores they are, but I also know that they love eating fresh oats and absolutely destroying the raspberries that sometimes grow around my plots. I think that's
pretty cool, although I can't really articulate why. Another thing that you'll learn to love about food plots is that if you want to keep them going, you gotta do the work. A lot of white tail hunting isn't really that much work these days, which is one of the reasons we love trail cameras. They just do so much of the heavy lifting for us now, unless you pay someone else to put your plots in, which if you do that, you're not really worried about a small kill
plot in the woods. Anyway. You're just gonna have to do some work from year to year. There will be brush to clear in the winter, soil to work in the spring, maintenance like mowing throughout the season, and probably if you're like me, you'll just find yourself piss sing off some yellow jacket and nests in the process. Because of those feisty som bitches seem to love food plots, and it gives me super great satisfaction to find a nest of them that has recently been dug up by
a bear. Take that, you stingy pricks. So is a little kill plot the answer to your deer hunting woes. Probably not, but it's another part of the process to love, and it just might keep a dough group or two around one of your favorite stand sites, or maybe you're into it just for your first buck, and that little six pointer who kind of got booted out of his home range and he's looking for someplace new decides to
set up shop in your clover. Maybe that's good enough and you're gonna be able to go in there and shoot him, Or those dough groups that swing through for a mouth full of clover happen to decide that your kill plot is going to be a part of their day to day life, and on one of those days, maybe about the first week of November, one of the big boys in the neighborhood will follow them into the
plot while you're sitting over it. Or maybe maybe you know someone who's never killed a deer and they'd be tickled pink to arrow dough and you could facilitate that
right quick with your little clover plot. Or perhaps you have twin girls who want to contribute to the family dowry of venison, and so they hunt hungry in a spot where a few doughs and a few spikes and forki's are likely to show up at some point in the season, and then when they do, you see one hell of a benefit to work in the soil and sweating your ass off and dodging some bees. Now, listen, I know some people who are going to hear this, and they're going to say food plots or bait plots,
and that's essentially cheating to them. I say, I don't care you do you and you hunt natural travel roads exclusively, that's what blows the wind up your skirt. A lot of hunters aren't like that, And honestly, when almost any hunter has the chance to put in a kill plot, they usually do. A lot of them fail, which is not a story you hear out of the hunting industry
very often, but it's true. It's not as easy as it looks to take a patch of woods or a natural meadow and transform it into a lush, beautiful spot full of the kind of calories that deer just can't ignore. But it is fun. So get out there if you can and start thinking about how to babysit the soil
a little bit to get something beneficial to grow. And tune in next week because it is the one hundredth episode of Foundations, and just for the hell of it, I'm going to tell you some deer hunting stories that might make you laugh, might make you ponder your own success, and will probably make you question how the hell I ever killed a single deer with my bowe in my life. That's it for this week, my friends, thank you so
much for tuning in. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. If you want more deer hunting advice, you want to read up a little bit more on on how to hunt hunting strategy, styles, tactics, whatever gear, go on over to the medieater dot com slash wired again, that's the medieater dot com slash wired, and you'll see a pile of hunting articles there, written by a whole bunch of different hunting experts.