Chris Ginn Creative Outdoors

I’m not a very patient person when it comes to waiting on deer food plots to come up and look like they do on the pictures on the sacks or the web sites. That’s why my Forage Feast food plot that I had to plant twice has been driving me crazy. After replanting it due to a gully washer of a rain storm that rolled through two days after the first planting, Washington Parish got another gully washer a couple days after my replanting.

It has been growing, but the best thing I could say about it was that it was green. Sparse growth and crinkly stalks of wheat and oats had me wondering if all my lime, fertilizer and seed had washed into the nearby low spot that was now serving as a drinking pond for deer.

I had read a lot about putting up exclusion cages, but I had never taken the time to put one up on my own plots. However, a few spots where I could tell deer had been grazing got me to wondering if they were eating it before it could grow.

A $15.00 roll of some kind of cage fencing from Lowe’s and three $2.00 poles later, I had a triangle shaped exclusion cage on my plot. I picked a spot that had sprouts of everything Forage Feast had in it, but I left unsure that it would every make me feel any better.

Since the acorns are dropping around my area, I visited my plot yesterday to put out a bag of Acorn Rage just to see how it would work. While I was there, I checked my exclusion cage and couldn’t believe what I saw. The greenery inside the cage wasn’t dramatically taller than what was outside, but everything outside the cage looked like it had been mowed level.

After careful inspection of the rest of my plot, I noticed that the entire plot looked as if I had just mowed it the day before. Without the exclusion cage, I never would have looked close enough to see any difference between what the plot would look like and what it did look like.

Tags: exclusion cage, food plot