Got in a conversation at the local watering hole. It came up in the conversation about food plots, where he mentioned that someone should plant hostas as the deer around his place seem to eat them down to nothing. I laughed and the noted they do the same around mine as well.
Has anyone tried that?
Well, first of all, it’s VERY difficult to find a plant that deer WON’T eat. In thinking about it, I know they won’t eat rhubarb, nettles, and cactus.
The goal with food plots for most landowners is to make their property a destination of choice for deer. The problem for most of us is that this strategy works too well and then the problem shifts from attracting deer to trying to figure out how you’re going to produce enough tonnage per acre to feed them.
Hostas would be a poor choice as a food plot crop, because they are very slow-growing and from my own experience, I’d say they don’t recover well from browsing pressure. The tonnage per acre would be very low for this reason.
And all that leaves out their nutritional value. I could find no information on the protein or nutrition content of hostas, but I suspect they wouldn’t be the best choice compared with high protein/carbohydrate crops that are commonly used.
Also, hostas tend to be root-propagated, so relative to seeded crops, they would be very, very labor-intensive to plant.
Funny observation, but not really a practical choice for food plots IMO.
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