Der Bauernhof

[shaman]

This is a cool feature of this forum. I really dig it, and want to get going. First off, a brief introduction. I am the shaman. Folks may know me from 24hourcampfire.com, Deer & Deer Hunting and Turkey & Turkey Hunting. I was/am a pro-staffer for the latter two. I also frequent KentuckyHunting.net, OldGobbler.com, and CastBoolits.

A bit of history: The weekend after 9/11/2001, my family took possession of 200 acres in southwest Bracken County, Kentucky. At the time, we did not know if it was going to be the family hunting camp or the family bunker. I have 3 sons. I was determined that they would not grow up as mall rats. Over time, we kind of wrapped our lives around the proposition that you can make deer camp a permanent way of life. My youngest, Angus, has no memory of life before deer camp. His brother, Moose, now has a child of his own, the Mooselette.

I am the patriarch of deer camp. I am in my 60th year. I've hunted deer and turkey since Reagan's first administration. I write extensively on deer and turkey hunting, and most of what I have written over the past couple decades has ended up in a weblog, Genesis 9:2-4 Ministries.

The official name of our camp is Der Bauernhof am Loch im Ende des Stumpfes. That's German for the Farm in the Hole in the End of the Stump. It's a long story, but we're a bunch of Cincinnati Krautheads from the north side of town. I'm 3rd Gen. I know enough German that I can tell you what your mother does to get bus money, but that's about it. KYHillCHick, my girlfriend and wife of two decades is pure KY Hillbilly.

Basic facts about Camp:

• 200 acres located in SW Bracken KY Kentucky, the Trans-Bluegrass.

• We're in Zone 1 -- 1 Buck per season, unlimited antlerless harvest

• 40 acres of open pasture, 160 acres of Oak/Hickory Savanna

• We have about 15 deer resident on the property at any given time. That probably includes 1-2 mature bucks.

• We have no more than 4 hunters on the property at a time.

• Our normal harvest is 3 bucks and 3 doe per year.

• In Kentucky, any centerfire firearm of .223 caliber or larger is legal.

• I had to give up bow hunting in 2007 due to chronic bursitis. We do most of our hunting in the modern weapons season that runs from mid-November until after Thanksgiving.

To continue the tour, I'll point you to two sites. The first is a website where I keep all the pics from the early years of camp. You'll see what the place looked like as we were fixing it up. It also has a bunch of nice panoramas
Der Bauernhof
The second site is a photo album of the hunting venues at the Der Bauernhof .
Hunting Venues

 

[shaman]

Here's the Topo:

Here's an aerial with approximate lot boundaries :

 

[Heart shot]

Looks like a great place! So are you planting any food? What’s your food plot strategy?

 

[shaman]

Food plot strategy? That's hit or miss. My big problem has been getting someone to help out. I've had 3 guys who've each agreed to mow hay in exchange for a small food plot. They'll comply for a year or two and then renege, and then I'm stuck until I find another. 3 guys over 17 years.

When I do get a plot done, I usually do wheat and clover on an acre or less. One year I tried black oil sunflower-- that was big hit with the deer, but they ate the tops off prematurely. Another field had state-provided wildlife mix. It did okay, but nothing stellar.

With all the frustration dealing with the hay dudes, I have resorted to other means. One thing I can get out of these guys is being lazy. By doing edge-feathering and leaving hard to mow spots alone, I have created a bunch of new habitat. The dark green patches on the aerial are cedar thickets. Some are 15 years old. Others are going on 40. They're providing a bunch of cover for deer.

Another thing I've done is selective fertilization. Right after the hay dudes come through, usually in late summer, I'll run out with my riding mower and my trusty spreader and put down "Pasture Fertilizer" from TSC. It's 16-6-16. It stimulates whatever's leftover after the mowing, and gets it up and green.

Another trick I've learned is to go out right about this time of year and sow clover seed-- just hand spreading it. That usually gives the turkey something to eat by mid-season.

One thing that still has me somewhat puzzled is The Garden of Stone. It's a 1-acre patch of old pasture that I've planted in wheat/clover a few times. Yes, the deer like it, but it's what comes up after that has piqued my curiosity. One year, early on, the hay dude got his drunk neighbor to come over and plow this patch. At the time, I was a tad peeved. I hadn't meant for them to disturb the soil that much, but it broke the strangle-hold of the fescue and all the natural forbs started coming up. Since then, I've had a mystery forb.

I've yet to figure out what it is exactly, but it grows out in the middle of this pasture, and it's tasty enough after the first hard freeze that the deer glom onto it after they've come off the acorns and come back out into field to browse in the evening. The Garden of Stone is less than a tennis court in size. However, we've taken 20 deer out of it in less than a decade. We call it the Garden of Stone, because I started off putting a rock next to the carcass so I could later step off how far the shot had been. The next thing I knew, I had a pile of rocks in basically the same spot.

In this pic, the Garden of Stone is roughly centered on the right-most hay bale. You can see my blind, Midway, in the background. If you look on the aerial photo posted previously you'll make out the Garden of Stone. There are two narrow pastures in the bottom right of the pic. The GOS is the bottom one. It's curved. I have a stand in the woods just to the south of south end of the field and my luxury box blind, Midway is in the fence line between the two pastures.

I'll be retiring down to the farm in a few years. As soon as I get there, I'll be buying a small tractor to do my own plots. In the meantime, I'll be open to ideas.

 

[Chainsaw]

Glad to see your property tour off and running; Kentucky looks like an exceptionally beautiful place judging from the forum threads on here. As regards ideas for planting, presumably there are no dairy farms there or you would likely have a farmer planting it for you. Here we can get a dairy farmer to plant something that works for them and the deer as well. It saves us a lot of time and dollars. Planting without a tractor is of course doable. Many of the people here have successfully used the "throw and mow" method and there is an excellent thread on it. It has worked fine in some spots for me and not so well in others. If I wanted to plant and had no tractor I would consider buying a drag harrow(tractor supply). I would then kill the field with Roundup using a back pack sprayer or a small sprayer on the four wheeler, give it plenty of time to die and rot. Loosen the very top layer of soil pulling the harrow with a four wheeler, side by side or even a pickup truck as a last resort. And then plant er up this fall about four to six weeks before hunting season with a mixture of oats and rye. Just spread the seed and then pull the harrow over it using the fence side to get the seeds covered. Note; we use BFO oats but others have luck with oats that cost 80% less. Also be conscious of avoiding compacting your soil with the pickup truck being sure to avoid driving on it excessively or in wetter conditions.

 

[shaman]

We're rather partial to the surroundings. It's not hilly like much of the land to the south and east. It's all flat on top of the ridges and then it drops off into hollows and ravines. There are a few dairy farms in the region, but mostly it's beef cattle, goats and sheep. This was a big tobacco region before the Federal buyout. Most folks have left their land go fallow. My farm had been tobacco and dairy before the early 80's and sat empty until I picked it up in 2001.

I'm reading up on throw 'n mow. It looks perfect for what I want to do. However, I also have to admit that the urge to plant plots flags when we're having so many good years without them. As I posted on another thread, everyone around me is either baiting with corn or planting food plots. Rather than compete, I've been kind of counter-programming. That is, I've been doing things that build bedding areas. One neighbor freely admitted that all he was doing with his big corn piles was feeding my deer. In the past couple of years, the numbers of deer I'm seeing has doubled during season. My guess is the hunting pressure drives them over to my place.

 

[Chainsaw]

We're rather partial to the surroundings. It's not hilly like much of the land to the south and east. It's all flat on top of the ridges and then it drops off into hollows and ravines. There are a few dairy farms in the region, but mostly it's beef cattle, goats and sheep. This was a big tobacco region before the Federal buyout. Most folks have left their land go fallow. My farm had been tobacco and dairy before the early 80's and sat empty until I picked it up in 2001.

I'm reading up on throw 'n mow. It looks perfect for what I want to do. However, I also have to admit that the urge to plant plots flags when we're having so many good years without them. As I posted on another thread, everyone around me is either baiting with corn or planting food plots. Rather than compete, I've been kind of counter-programming. That is, I've been doing things that build bedding areas. One neighbor freely admitted that all he was doing with his big corn piles was feeding my deer. In the past couple of years, the numbers of deer I'm seeing has doubled during season. My guess is the hunting pressure drives them over to my place.

It sounds like there is more idle land than the farmers need; here it is the opposite. Throw and Mow can be excellent but it alone is not enough here. It is probably best to try it in several places to determine which ones it may work in on your property. Two of the four purposes of the plots here are to give the deer a place where they can eat and relax and spend time in a relatively safer place than the surrounding neighbors some of whom bait(illegally) and shoot way more than their share of deer(also illegally). Secondly like focal points in the flower garden that draw ones' eye the plots act as focal points to the deer and the paths from one plot to the next and from sanctuaries to plots are used by the deer just like the paths in a well designed garden are used by people. Our properties after all are really gardens, deer gardens that is with food plots as focal points to the deer. There is no doubt that some deer grow older here with the plots than they likely would have without them, more deer call the property their main home and the paths between focal points provide exciting low impact, close range hunting. We've tried it both ways, with plots and without and hands down plots are the winner here.
Note; While some are large, many of our plots are less than an acre in size. The large plots are planted large for the third and fourth reasons and that is to help feed the deer thru winter and in some cases provide excellent fawning cover the following June.
And a free benefit to plots is that one with the least intrusive access can be used to shoot about all the does one may need to cull for the year in one hunt.

 

[shaman]

Yes, the property around me is highly under-utilized. Farmers took their tobacco settlement and ran or converted to beef cattle. Fewer of the newer generation farms, so a lot of the land is going fallow. That makes for a huge whitetail population. My place is no different. Outside of the 40 acres that get mowed for hay there's maybe 20 acres that's growing up and going wild on me. In most cases, I'm just letting it go, because it increases the bedding for the deer.

 

[Native Hunter]

Welcome. We are in the same state but many, many miles apart.

 

[shaman]

I've found some photos of one of my better experiments with food plots. In 2009, the guy that did my hay came out and used a roto-tiller to turn up 3 plots. One got planted in KY-state-provided wildlife mix. One got planted in black oil sunflowers, pumpkins and squash. The third was clover and wheat.

Here is a link to the photo album. I'd lost the photos and had to go back and repost them to my weblog.

Food Plot 2009