Planting To Attract Deer and Other Game To Your Hunting Property
Nothing attracts animals quite as food does. An online nursery with cattails and other wildlife-attracting plants can help you on your journey.
Short of the urge to reproduce, the instinct for an animal to keep itself fed is the most powerful, so planting a food plot on your hunting property is a sure-fire way to increase your chances of bagging some game this hunting season. It is, however, slightly more complicated than just sprinkling some seeds on the ground. You can buy different types of garden plants that will best attract a given animal. The place in which you plant is equally critical to your success. As a landowner, you should never forget that food plots are an addition, too, not a substitution for; responsible land management practices to maintain the game animal population over a large area. Food plots will only serve to lure games to a particular area for a short amount of time.
When in the planning stages of creating a food plot, the two most important things to consider are the type(s) of the game you intend to hunt and the place you plan to put it.
Deer, for example, have some special considerations. A buck's home range is about a square mile and about 200 acres for a doe. They have not attracted food plots outside of their range. Your property needs a suitable habitat; food plots will not draw game from miles away. For this same reason, it is better to disperse multiple smaller food plots around your property than to have one huge one. With multiple plots, you could be spanning multiple home ranges. In general, deer are in their most dire nutritional straits in late winter and early spring, and you should consider this when choosing garden plants for your plot.
As far as other game animals go, pick plants to suit them. Ideally, it would help if you had a mixture of low-lying brush, shrubs, and trees to attract the most significant number of different animals. The specific plants to buy are very hard to recommend given the vastly different climates that this can take place. A good rule of thumb is that the best plants for animals to forage from are the ones that already exist in your area naturally. They should also be hardy and ideally require little maintenance.
