Last year, a northern Lycoming County landowner whom I have known for quite some time approached me about helping him design and develop a food plot.

He owns 120 acres, which included 50 acres of open fallow fields and a wooded area of about 70 acres that stretched up a hillside and across a mountain top, where several other large properties bordered it.

After cruising the property and considering the terrain, we decided on a location at the top in the woods, which would require dropping numerous red oak, chestnut oak, maple, and black birch trees, resulting in an opening of about one acre.

There were a good many white oak trees on top as well, but we selected an area where we could avoid cutting any of them, since their acorns were a preferred food source for wildlife.

The plot would be oval in shape, with additional trees dropped on the western side to provide added sunlight in the evening hours.

Once the trees were dropped and cut for firewood, the remaining tops would be chipped. The mountain laurel and other brush were small enough that they could be chopped up with a brush hog.

That was the plan to create the opening for the food plot.

Work began in early June, over several weekends, as a crew of friends and neighbors joined in to drop the trees and cut and split firewood. The remaining tops were chipped in a process that took about 6 hours, producing several piles of chips that would decay and later be used as mulch for any seedlings that might be added to the outside edges of the plot. Next, the stumps that remained had to be addressed. Old stumps from trees that were cut years earlier were able to be removed with the front-end loader of a 50-horsepower tractor, but the fresh tree stumps would not budge. These were trimmed as flush to the ground as possible, and then covered with a layer of 46-0-0 nitrogen to expedite the decaying process.

Limbs and logs left over from a timbering 15 years earlier were gathered and moved into several large piles along the border of the clearing, and placed in such a fashion as to help direct the flow of game entering the food plot. The openings between the piles were left near large oak trees where ladder stands could eventually be erected. A small tractor pulling a stone rake was then used to clear the smaller limbs and debris, level the seed bed, and fill the holes created by the stump removal. The landowner had considered piling all of this debris into one huge pile in the center of the plot and burning it. Still, safety, manpower, and liability issues indicated that burning would not be a viable option.

A soil sample had been taken before the project had begun. Since the existing soil was of poor quality, the landowner had two large loads of topsoil and mushroom soil mix delivered and spread over the entire area using a tractor with a front-end loader and a stone rake. Pelletized nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, and lime were spread and worked in with the use of a 4-foot drag harrow pulled behind a 4-wheeler.

Seeding was done by hand, since there was less than an acre to cover. First, buckwheat seed was applied over the entire plot, then some leftover clover seed was distributed (while it is not the ideal time to apply clover seed, it was a good opportunity to use up the seed). Sugar beet seed and a mix of seeds of chicory, rape, turnips, and brassicas from the Whitetail Institute could be added later to create a fall food source that would coincide with the upcoming archery and rifle seasons. As a final step, the entire seed bed was tamped down using an old crow’s-foot cultipacker pulled behind the 4-wheeler.

That final step occurred in the second week of July, and left only one thing to aid the process of creating a successful food plot — rain. Lo and behold, the very next day, blue skies gave way in the afternoon to a thunderstorm that provided an hour of steady and moderate rain that would jump-start the growth of the seeds! And with that, a food plot was born! This fall, hybrid chestnut and apple tree seedlings, along with fruit-bearing shrubs, will be added around the edges of the opening that will provide a variety of food for wildlife throughout the coming years.