So we got our first snow of the season over night. I was able to get out this evening and take a few pics....had a few 4 legged friends who wanted to tag along...
My SW plot... you can see the weeds/switchgrass buffers around my fall plot, with the latest shooting house.... I have plans to plant some MG around the shooting house to help hide the access to it. This is the same plot where I saw the buck I had to pass on. This is along a natural travle way with a decent creek behind where I am standing. The deer move thru here to move between bigger areas of woods.
While I was out I thought I would take a pic of this soft edge... This is where some natural weeds meet a switchgrass planting and the deer follow this edge....you can see the deer trail the dogs are on. This wasn't done on purpose, but it certainly shows how an edge of even different cover types (thought very similar) can help guide deer movement. The switchgrass has some native weeds in it so it's not a monoculture....but it's far thicker than the goldenrod and the like on the right side of the photo. This is a little path that leads from a small block of woods to my plot in the SW.
This is my plot area in the south bottom area. This area is a flood plain and you can see the plots in the photo, but you can again see the weeds/switchgrass buffers and the the wooded slope. This is a difficult area to hunt because the deer like to bed up on the slope and then can see this entire bottom area... This poses an issue also because I have to come from the higher elevation (where the house is). So I try to pick a small area where I come down the slope and then try to drop down into a creek bed when possible to access stands. I like the switchgrass simply because it stands well in the snow and has more cover than just the natural weeds. Goldenrod and ragweed and the like simply turn into a mini-forest of sticks and don't provide a lot of cover this time of year. The switchgrass does a far better job...as long as you keep in in a mixture to keep both food (mostly for birds) and the cover in a balance.

I figure by the weekend the snow will be gone...