If you’ll start now working on improving the green fields on your hunting club or farm, you’ll have more and bigger deer to hunt with your CVA muzzleloader. According to Dr. Grant Woods of Reeds Spring, Missouri, a nationally-known wildlife biologist and white-tailed deer researcher, “A 1-acre food plot on your land can make a tremendous difference in the amount of food available for deer to eat. A quality food plot should produce 2,000 to 10,000 pounds of dry forage per acre per year.” Woods reports that the hardwood forests in the United States only will produce about 200 pounds of dry forage per acre. An acre of cutover land probably will yield 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of dry forage per acre. By planting highly-nutritious food plots with quality seed suited to your section of the country, you not only can increase the amount of food available for deer to eat but also the quality of that food. Then you’ll grow more and bigger deer on your property that you can hunt.

But merely planting a food plot doesn’t insure that the plot will produce a large amount of high-quality food for the deer, unless you follow procedures like these:

• Have a soil test of the land done to determine where you need to lime and/or fertilize.

• Apply lime, if the soil test dictates the land needs liming. Then allow time for the lime to absorb into the ground prior to planting.

• Apply a high-quality commercial-grade time-released fertilizer ‚Äì perhaps 28-10-10 ‚Äì at planting time. You only need to apply this fertilizer once a year, whether you plant in the fall or the spring. Time-released nitrogen granules will release their nutrients gradually, which means there’s less nutrient loss from leaching over a long time. The continually-fed plants will contain more protein than conventionally-maintained plants, which translates into bigger and healthier deer.

Often when muzzleloading hunters plant food plots, they don’t leave thick-cover corridors for deer to use to go to or come out of those food plots. Biologists have found a serpentine or a snake-like design for food plots to be the most productive. If you build and maintain the food plot in thick cover, the likelihood of the deer’s using the food plot during daylight hours will increase greatly.

To further drastically increase your odds for taking a nice buck with your CVA muzzleloader this season near honey holes and green fields:

• Find the trails deer use when moving from their feeding to their bedding sites.

• Fertilize nut trees, shrubs and grasses in thick cover close to the deer’s bedding sites. By having highly-nutritious deer food near a deer’s bed, a deer often will stop and feed at this site as it leaves from or returns to its bedding area. If you put a tree stand near the site you’ve fertilized, then you can take a buck in the early morning or late afternoon there.

• Fertilize certain trees, shrubs or grasses on which the deer feed along the trail the animal takes to its primary food source, possibly a green field, an agricultural field or a nut-producing tree other hunters on your hunting lease have identified as a hot spot. This tactic may help you get a buck to stop and feed before he reaches his primary food source.

• Fertilize trees, shrubs or grasses in thick-cover places close to the deer’s food source.¬† If an older-aged-class buck feeds in an agricultural field or on a planted green field, he’ll often hold in thick cover close to that feeding site and wait until nightfall to move out into the field. By fertilizing foods a buck can snack on before he goes to the green field after dark, you can create a honey hole where you can take a fine buck just before nightfall. Remember, fertilizer has two tremendous benefits for the hunter. It can enable you to bring deer out into the open, and it will increase the amount of nutritious food for your deer herd to grow bigger and healthier deer. Using fertilizer as a hunting tool to grow and take deer may be one of the best-kept secrets in the entire outdoors.