I thought I would start taking my camera with me when I am out and about on the properties my friends and I own and have done habitat improvement projects on. This is a slow time of year and I figured I would add some reference material for people looking to try different things.
I went out today to bring in a Double Bull blind that I have been unsuccessfully trying to shoot a late season archery doe from. Rain is coming and I am done for the year. Bisecting my two food plots is a travel corridor I have planted with Red Osier Dogwood bare roots and a dibble bar. This is an area that was wet and a pain to plant as a food plot, so I decided to let it go and create a thicket/travel corridor the deer would use to cross the large field between the two plots. This is in front of a shooting house and I thought it would funnel deer right in front of the shooting house. The corridor is probably 8 years in the making. I planted 200-400 barefoot ROD a year for about 4-5 years, only takes a few hours to plant a couple hundred with the dibble bar. The deer hammered them the first 2-3 years and they could not get ahead of the browse pressure. I did absolutely nothing to protect them. A person could get good results in 4 years I think by protecting the shrubs and eliminating competing weeds. The browsing didn't kill them, they just couldn't get above the weeds because they were browsed back every year.
Somewhere around year four the deer couldn't keep up with everything I had in the ground and some started to shoot up. I took a backpack sprayer that spring and sprayed around a bunch of them and that really helped, they really took off. I haven't done anything to them since and they are continuing to get bigger. Deer frequently use this corridor and will hang out in it for long periods of time. The pictures don't really show all the shrubs, there are a lot more smaller ones there that don't show up in the pictures. Snow has knocked down much of the grass and goldenrod. This was an open spot, the whole corridor is full of these and you can just see the tops above the goldenrod in the background. You can see they browse the heck out of the ROD. These are picky deer that are well fed, this is next to a 2 acre clover plot and 3 acres of standing corn. Gives you an idea how important browse is and how much they like the ROD. They are a great shrub for deer.



I went out today to bring in a Double Bull blind that I have been unsuccessfully trying to shoot a late season archery doe from. Rain is coming and I am done for the year. Bisecting my two food plots is a travel corridor I have planted with Red Osier Dogwood bare roots and a dibble bar. This is an area that was wet and a pain to plant as a food plot, so I decided to let it go and create a thicket/travel corridor the deer would use to cross the large field between the two plots. This is in front of a shooting house and I thought it would funnel deer right in front of the shooting house. The corridor is probably 8 years in the making. I planted 200-400 barefoot ROD a year for about 4-5 years, only takes a few hours to plant a couple hundred with the dibble bar. The deer hammered them the first 2-3 years and they could not get ahead of the browse pressure. I did absolutely nothing to protect them. A person could get good results in 4 years I think by protecting the shrubs and eliminating competing weeds. The browsing didn't kill them, they just couldn't get above the weeds because they were browsed back every year.
Somewhere around year four the deer couldn't keep up with everything I had in the ground and some started to shoot up. I took a backpack sprayer that spring and sprayed around a bunch of them and that really helped, they really took off. I haven't done anything to them since and they are continuing to get bigger. Deer frequently use this corridor and will hang out in it for long periods of time. The pictures don't really show all the shrubs, there are a lot more smaller ones there that don't show up in the pictures. Snow has knocked down much of the grass and goldenrod. This was an open spot, the whole corridor is full of these and you can just see the tops above the goldenrod in the background. You can see they browse the heck out of the ROD. These are picky deer that are well fed, this is next to a 2 acre clover plot and 3 acres of standing corn. Gives you an idea how important browse is and how much they like the ROD. They are a great shrub for deer.


