For hunters and land managers
A food plot that gets better every year.
Annual plots reset to zero every spring. A chestnut and persimmon planting compounds. Ten years in, it is the reason deer are on your ground instead of the neighbor's.
Why chestnuts beat oaks
Acorns are loaded with tannins, which are bitter and interfere with protein digestion. Chestnuts are not. A chestnut is roughly forty percent carbohydrate with very low tannin, which is why given a choice between a chestnut and an acorn on the same ground, deer take the chestnut nearly every time.
Chestnuts also produce far sooner. A white oak may take twenty years or more to drop a meaningful crop. Chestnut seedlings on good care commonly start producing in year three to five, and they bear heavily and consistently rather than in boom-and-bust mast years.
The practical version: chestnuts are the highest-value hard mast you can plant, they produce within a hunting career instead of a lifetime, and they produce every year instead of every third year.
Stagger your drop window
This is the part most people miss. Planting twenty trees of one family means everything hits the ground in a two-week window and then the food is gone. Planting the same twenty trees across four or five families with different ripening dates stretches your food source across the entire season.
- Early September: early-ripening families like Layeroka, Tanzawa and Precoce Migoule get food on the ground before the acorns start.
- Late September into October: the mid-season Chinese families such as Qing, Peach and Gideon carry the bulk of the crop.
- Mid to late October: later families like Scott, Maraval and Whitten South extend the tail end.
- Late September through hard frost: American persimmons keep dropping soft, sugary fruit the entire time, right through the rut.
Protect them or lose them
The irony of planting deer food is that deer will eat the trees before the trees ever make a nut. An unprotected seedling in Iowa deer country is a food plot of one. Every tree gets a tube and a stake at planting, or a T-post and welded wire cage if cattle share the ground.
Buck rub is the other killer. A tube protects the trunk through the years when a seedling is exactly the right diameter to look attractive to a rutting buck.
How to lay out a wildlife orchard
- Space trees 30 to 40 feet apart so they never shade each other out.
- Keep families within a couple hundred feet of each other for cross pollination.
- Plant near travel corridors and cover, not in the middle of an open field where deer feel exposed in daylight.
- Think about your stand and wind before you plant, not after the trees are producing.
- Kill the grass around every trunk. Competition is what stunts wildlife plantings.
Do not build your plan around American chestnut. It is a beautiful native tree and we sell it for heritage plantings, but it is highly blight susceptible and will most likely become infected as it matures. For a food source you can count on, plant Chinese and hybrid families.
Build the planting
Tell us your county, your acreage and how you hunt it. We'll design a mix that feeds deer from early bow season through the rut.