My family owns and lives on a 80 acre property in northern Minnesota. Except for some trees we have planted and a wooded swamp, our property is just an old pasture.
I’d love to transform it into some prime deer habitat with maybe some grouse as a bonus. Being that lots of my neighbors are brown and down hunters, if I actually want to harvest a mature buck, it
would have to live most of, if not all of its life on our property.
I added some pictures below to show you the start of my plan:
The red border shows the property line of our 80 acres.
The green and yellow chunks at the bottom show where I’d like to plant corn and alfalfa, and the red spot with the star covers up our house, barn, garden and yard area.
The black arch is a windbreak of spruce we planted a while back, and now is about 20 ft tall.
Now on to the north half, which is what I want to focus on.
The white area shows where young aspen is starting to creep in from the neighbors woods, and the area that I might plant more aspen. The brown chunks show where Id like to plant some heavy bedding cover and woody browsing food for the deer. (haslebrush, dogwood, nine bark, plums etc.) And the black outlines show where I picture planting clusters of spruce or pine for some thermal cover. Lastly the blue shoes wet areas. The chunk shaped like an alien’s head is woody, with mostly alder and willow, the other two are not wooded at all, and just tall grass.
What do you think about this plan as a start? What’s missing? What would you change? What would you add? Some sort of grass like switchgrass mixed into the other cover?
And mainly what would you do with the blank area in the middle? Add more bedding cover? Plant some hardwoods? Plant aspen or pine and cut trails through it, funneling the deer down to the crops on the south end?
Any advice would be a huge help,
Thank you!
I’d love to transform it into some prime deer habitat with maybe some grouse as a bonus. Being that lots of my neighbors are brown and down hunters, if I actually want to harvest a mature buck, it
would have to live most of, if not all of its life on our property.
I added some pictures below to show you the start of my plan:
The red border shows the property line of our 80 acres.
The green and yellow chunks at the bottom show where I’d like to plant corn and alfalfa, and the red spot with the star covers up our house, barn, garden and yard area.
The black arch is a windbreak of spruce we planted a while back, and now is about 20 ft tall.
Now on to the north half, which is what I want to focus on.
The white area shows where young aspen is starting to creep in from the neighbors woods, and the area that I might plant more aspen. The brown chunks show where Id like to plant some heavy bedding cover and woody browsing food for the deer. (haslebrush, dogwood, nine bark, plums etc.) And the black outlines show where I picture planting clusters of spruce or pine for some thermal cover. Lastly the blue shoes wet areas. The chunk shaped like an alien’s head is woody, with mostly alder and willow, the other two are not wooded at all, and just tall grass.
What do you think about this plan as a start? What’s missing? What would you change? What would you add? Some sort of grass like switchgrass mixed into the other cover?
And mainly what would you do with the blank area in the middle? Add more bedding cover? Plant some hardwoods? Plant aspen or pine and cut trails through it, funneling the deer down to the crops on the south end?
Any advice would be a huge help,
Thank you!
