Does anyone put in pumpkins for the deer? The damn deer around my house took both my kids pumpkins and ate them in a couple nights, they were bigger than basketballs, they went nuts over them. The little buggers do thus every year…..seems I need to shoot the deer at my house instead of going to the hunting property.
It’s weird, cause I’ve heard deer love pumpkins for years. I’ve tried putting pumpkins in front of my trail cams for a couple years. I haven’t had the deer eat them yet. Just squirrels and birds.
Ya it is weird. We have deer come from a long way to get our pumpkins. The punch the heck out of them. Once they hit em they don’t seem to miss a night until they are gone.
I have a friend that plants about an acre of pumpkins every year.
DT
A few years ago I working in the west metro and right at dusk I saw two does grab a pumpkin by the top with their mouth and slam it on the road. they each took a chunk with them.
This doesn’t make sense but it seems the deer that live around urban area’s love them but put them in rural settings and they don’t even look at them. I guess in rural areas there diets don’t include pumpkins.
The deer will eat them by me, but not till they have frozen and are busted up. Too mush farm crop around me, and I guess they like that better. They will start to eat the pumpkins in December, and once they start, will show up every night till gone.
The issue for food plotters isn’t will deer eat pumpkins. They certainly will, deer will eat a lot of things.
It’s really about the volume you can grow on a given unit of land. You can grow hundreds of more pounds of brassicas like radish and turnips on an acre of land then you can grow pumpkins. Since the number one problem for food plotters is over browsing anytime you can grow a greater volume of a food you’re going to be better off because it’s going to last longer.
Grouse
We used to haul a truck load of leftover pumpkins up to were we used to hunt in WI each fall. The deer absolutely loved them, but we had to slam them on the ground to break them up otherwise they’d completely ignore them.
About 27 years of food plots on my farm. The small white pumpkins are preferable over traditional orange big pumpkins. Like
MST food sources, when it’s time, they hit them hard then move on
The deer eat all the pumpkins we put out in our back yard in town. I grow them in the country and they only eat them out there when they are about the size of a basketball and green. The ones that get get left out there usually just rot away.
Interesting feedback. We gave no shortage of food and I will try growing some next year and see how it goes. They gave not been hitting our brasicas as much as I would like, we gave plenty but they don’t seem very interested, dame last year….they really like our soybeans….and the bears love the clover, sounds like a horse out there eating it.
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