THEY HAVE OPTIONS. LOOK WHERE THEY CHOSE TO BE.
These deer have plenty of food available across these 17 acres—milo, cereal grain, green soybeans, surrounding oak ridges dropping hard mast, and plenty of other browse.
BUT LOOK WHERE THE DEER ARE CONCENTRATED
They’re in the soft mast.
I’ve always said the food plot is the cake and falling fruit is the icing. This picture is a pretty good example of what I mean.
Food plots and ag can feed deer across a large area.
Falling fruit can concentrate them into a very specific spot.
And for a deer hunter, that difference matters.
We can’t bait here in my area of Pennsylvania, and with the season opening in a day, I also made sure everything was good with the Game Commission before flying and sharing these drone images.
Sometimes one picture from above explains it better than a five-minute video ever could, or all my pics and posts
Plant the food. Stack the drop times. Put the deer where you want them.
Good luck this season!
www.bluehillwildlifenursery.com
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PA Archery Opening Weekend Sale — October 2–5!
Pennsylvania archery season opens October 3, and we’re celebrating with a special sale on our Bow Stand Fruit Tree Package.
From October 2 through October 5, use code BOWSTAND5 at checkout to save an additional 5% on the Bow Stand fruit tree package.
Our fruit tree packages already include a 5% package discount compared with purchasing the trees individually—so this sale gives you even more savings on a package designed with deer hunters in mind.
The Bow Stand package makes it easy to establish a productive fruit tree planting near your hunting setup and provide a dependable food source for years to come.
- 5% package savings already included
- Extra 5% off October 2–5
- Use code: BOWSTAND5
If you’ve been thinking about adding fruit trees around your hunting property, opening weekend is a great time to get your planting plans in place for spring of 2027.
Sale ends October 5.
#BlueHillWildlifeNursery #PAArchery #DeerHunting #WhitetailHabitat #FruitTreesForDeer #HabitatManagement #landmanagement
The Bow Stand Fruit Tree Package
bluehillwildlifenursery.com
Bow Stand Package with archery season fruit trees that attract deer, improve wildlife habitat, and help create better bowhunting opportunities.0 CommentsComment on Facebook
Two pictures of OctoberCrab™.
The first one is from last evening. This is a grafted OctoberCrab™ that I planted two years ago, looking back toward my blind. The second picture shows the original tree so you can see what I will have in time.
Because OctoberCrab™ is grafted, I know what I’m putting in the ground. The graft is a clone of the original tree, so I know I’m going to get the same fruit and the same general drop time. Here in my area, that means a sustainable amount of fruit hitting the ground in October.
Yes, the crabapples may only be about a quarter in size, but remember, deer eat acorns that size or smaller.
Mast moves deer to a specific location at a specific time, whether it’s hard mast or soft mast.
That’s what I’m doing in this orchard. I’m stacking drop times with grafted trees.
What does “stacking drop times” mean?
Simply put, OctoberCrab™ will be one of the first trees putting fruit on the ground. Then I compound that across different species. I’ll have persimmons, apples, crabs, and pears dropping at different times, but I will compound the most fruit hitting the ground when I want it, and that is during the season.
The goal is to keep mast hitting the ground and give deer a reason to keep coming back to the same location during the time I want them there — in season.
It takes time to build all of this, but this orchard already has the cake — clover and chicory. The icing to fall from above is getting more established every year.
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Not about trees, but about feeding deer! To those of you who kept telling me to plant Milo — thank you!
I only planted about an acre this year because I wanted to test it and see what my deer thought.
Well, in the last two weeks, they have absolutely crushed it. The heads are gone!
I actually had to walk around looking for weeds to find a Milo head for this picture.
What I really like is that they left it alone for most of the summer. Then, when those heads started to mature, they found it and went to work. I didn't plant until June.
Next year, I’ll plant it thicker and probably just mix in some beans.
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One I stuck in this past spring, and a great example of why I can’t help myself and keep planting those Crabs.
They grow fast, they produce, and I just like seeing them loaded up like this even at a young age.
Crabs are King!
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I have one property where the deer mice call almost every tree tube home. They build a nest about halfway up the tube, chew on the tree, and they really start doing it this time of year as the temperatures get cold.
No matter what I’ve tried, I haven’t found a good way to utilize the tubes longer on this particular property.
My answer is to use the tube for a few months during that first growing season. Then, once I can get the tree well above the deer browse, I take the tube off.
These were 2–3' chestnuts I planted this past spring. The tube is gone now, and I’ve switched them over to aluminum screen and a cage.
I’ll get a gallon or two of stone around the tree, put down a small piece of breathable weed mat, and then add another 6–8 gallons of stone on top of the mat as time permits.
But the tube is gone.
That tube makes a pretty nice little heated microclimate for those mice, and I don’t need to keep providing them with a house.
I’ve also found that wrapping electrical tape backwards around the fiberglass stake is enough to hold the tree for a few months. By the time the tape starts giving up, the leaves are coming off, the tree has gained some strength swaying in the wind, and ready to support itself.
Sometimes you just have to figure out what works on your own property.
Every property is a little different and I never had this issue on others, but if this post helps someone that's what I'm after. You will also see white paint it's the cheapest Valspar exterior that Lowes sells mixed with Sevin dust. Beatle bores love to hit a chestnut tree coming out of a tube in my experience.
The chestnut trees in the foreground are a year older, The Switch grass to the left is 20' wide and what I used for a border between me and the neighbors and runs for a few 100 yards into a 60-tree orchard of just chestnuts as I don't commonly put them in with fruit trees. I was pretty impressed at the number of does that stashed their babies in this strip of switch this past spring.
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Now that's an interesting chestnut burr from Fall Draw! bluehillwildlifenursery.com/product/fall-draw-chinese-chestnut-deer-chestnut/
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I don’t take the time that I should to show off all the great trees you guys are growing and the pictures you send me!
Carl is knocking it out of the park in Beaver Dams, New York, with his grafted persimmons!
It’s pretty cool to see what you guys are doing with the trees after they leave here and your doing it in short time!
Keep the pictures coming! I really enjoy seeing them.
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Deer Luscious™ Persimmons are starting to hit the ground!
The deer are already beating down the weeds around these trees.
And if you’ve ever eaten one, you know exactly why. They are that good and non-astringent when they fall free from the tree! Not that astringent fruit hitting the ground to lay there and ripen doesn't have their place, but I like my fruit ready to eat for my deer.
This is one of those fruits that makes you think, maybe I don’t want the deer to have them after all.
But when you’re planting for wildlife, that’s exactly what you want to see.
Blue Hill Wildlife Nursery – Persimmon Trees
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Why do I like grafted trees so much?
RoadKill™ Crabapple is a great example.
When we graft RoadKill™, we take scion wood from the original tree and graft it onto rootstock. That means the fruiting portion of every RoadKill™ we produce has the same genetics as the original tree we selected.
That matters to me as a hunter.
When I plant a grafted tree, I know what I’m planting and why I’m planting it. I know the characteristics I selected it for, including when I expect that tree to produce and drop fruit.
Compare that to planting a seedling. You can get much more variation in what you ultimately get.
I don't want to wait years for a tree to mature and then find out it doesn't do what I need it to.
I want to plan my orchard around specific goals.
And that leads into something I spend a lot of time thinking about:
Stacking drop times.
More on that next. When looking at compounding species and drop times at a specific location!
Crabs are King!
BlueHillWildlifeNursery.com
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