Does anyone have this happen?
I am in my second year of a food plot and it seems this year at least the deer ate the greens/tops of the turnips and diakon radish,.. but I see no sign of them digging up the actual root part and eating that.
Will they eventually catch on, do others see this? Might that just be the way it is?
Zone 6
On my place, deer will start on radish tops as soon as they emerge. They typically don't hit turnip tops until after we get our first frost, but in real bad mast crop years like this, they will hit the turnip tops (along with anything else I plant) much earlier. In normal years they will hit the radish tubers next. We sometimes get warm/freezing cycles in Nov/Dec. The radish tubers will sometimes rot in the warm cycles and deer will stop using them. In normal years, our turnip tubers don't get hit until after our season is over. I see most use of turnip tubers in late January and early February.
Deer use of foods depends on a lot of factors. In my opinion, the biggest driver of what deer choose to eat is their perception of risk. Hunting pressure impacts the use of daytime foods more than anything else. In a typical year, we will see most daytime use in our plots by fawn with does. The reason for this is that fawns have to put on sufficient weight to get through winter and they have the least experience in assessing risk. This is true even further south than us. Winters are milder but the rut is more drawn out and more fawn are born later. Raising fawns is like herding cats. Does are much more wary using food plots during the daytime in hunting season, so the fawn usually enter the field first. Using them a canaries, after watching them feed for a while, does will enter the field and feed with them.
Mast crop failure years are good examples of the balance. This limits the amount of high quality, high carb foods that are in cover. In good mast crop years deer will just bed in the acorn flats, stand up, walk 20 yards, eat their fill, and lay back down. This makes them hard to hunt. In mast crop failure years, with limited quality food in cover, they will carefully venture into food plots during daytime hours even in the face of hunting pressure so they can digest enough quality food to deal with the winter.
Many folks plant for attraction. Attraction is not just a function of how deer prefer crop A over crop B. It has much more to do with the balance between sufficient food and relative safety and it changes every year with nature. In my area, I can plant the cheapest lowest attraction deer foods an in mast crop failure years they will be hammered. I can plant the most expensive and attractive crops available and have a great crop and in a heavy mast crop year they will go untouched. This is because acorns drive everything in our area. There is a direct correlation between fawn buck weights and how heavy the acorn crop was the previous fall.
We can talk in generalities about how deer relate to specific crops (tops, tubers, radish, turnip...), but much of this depends on conditions in the particular year in that particular area.
Thanks,
Jack
