Enhancing Natural Food Production on Your Property

-By Randy Cooper

I’ve been asked a lot lately about how to get natural vegetation, fruit and mast bearing trees to produce more on hunting properties and attract more wildlife. The answer is to fertilize the already existing plants and trees that benefit deer, turkey, quail and the host of other critters on your hunting property.

Through scouting, I’ve noticed the places deer like to feed and the travel corridors they like to use. I’ve found several varieties of oak trees on my property that deer love to feed on when acorns are falling. Knowing the area and lay of the land really helps put the puzzle together in plotting a hunting strategy. I’ll find a stand sight in a tree with good foliage cover that allows me a bow shot at an oak tree I know from experience the deer love to hit when the acorns start falling.

I’ll mark these trees with surveyors ribbon so that in the winter, when all the leaves have fallen and the sap in the trees is at its lowest, I can find and fertilize them. There is a specific way I go about this that I have learned from the advice of farmers, QDMA members, respected wildlife biologists and from hard learned personal experience.

If I can find a tree that deer seem to pay more attention to than any other tree in the area, I’m in business. Usually the reason they are hitting this tree and ignoring the others that are dropping just as many acorns is that this is what I call a “SWEET TREE”. Simply, this means that the tannic acid content in the acorns this oak tree is producing is lower than any of the other trees in the immediate area. The acorns don’t taste as bitter to the deer, therefore they are sweeter. Finding one of these special trees takes some looking but when you find it, you’ll know what you’re looking. From the base of the trunk, all the way out to the drip line and beyond, there will hardly be a leaf to be found and the ground itself will look like a roto-tiller has chewed it up with all the tracks and droppings there. It truly is a sight to see! By fertilizing this already good tree, I’ll make it even better next fall.

I like to do this after the season closes. I’ll get several bags of 10-10-10 fertilizer. The first number is for nitrogen, the second number represents phosphorus and the third number is for potassium. Along with this I like to add zinc in a granulated form. I mix the zinc with the fertilizer in a 5-gallon bucket and then fill my handheld broadcast spreader. I spread fertilizer around the entire tree at the DRIP LINE. This is the imaginary line formed by how far out from the trunk of the tree the limbs grow. Underground, the root system will reach out to the drip line and that’s where you want the fertilizer to reach when the rain soaks it in. You don’t want to get any closer to the trunk of the tree than that.

A good rule of thumb as far as how much fertilizer to use is: 1POUND OF FERTILIZER TO EVERY INCH OF DIAMETER OF THE TREE TRUNK AT ABOUT CHEST HIGH. So if the diameter of the oak is 14 inches, use 14 pounds of fertilizer.

You can also fertilize greenbriar, honeysuckle, persimmon trees, crabapples and muscadines in the same manner. I buy persimmon, apple, crabapple and sawtooth oak tree saplings from an online supplier. They ship them in good shape with very little soil on them. They are wrapped in wet newspaper surrounded by plastic sheeting to hold the moisture in. I plant these in the corners of my food plots. I usually use potting mix and about a cup of lime mixed together in the hole I’ve dug for the sapling. I water it in with Miracle Grow mixed in the water. For support, I stake the tree to the ground using rope tied to it in three directions. I also use a piece of flexible black drain pipe that we’ve all seen with the drain holes in it to put around the trunk of the tree to protect it from bucks rubbing it and possibly killing it until it gets to be about a year old. At that time I can just cut it off with sheet metal shears and the tree is on its way.

I know all this sounds like a lot of work and it is. For me, I get the thrill of truly seeing the FRUITS of my labor. If you’re as passionate about farming for wildlife as I am and so many more that I know, it’s an accepted part of the big picture we all want to see each and every fall and we don’t mind doing it. I live for doing this in my beloved woods and absolutely love seeing the difference I’ve made in the health of the deer, turkey and other animals that live there. This is one more way that I attract and hold deer on the properties I hunt. Try employing some of these time tested tactics that I’ve used on your property and see the difference it makes in your wildlife and in your experience.