*Editor’s note - If you’re gaining access to new ground this summer, you may be wondering what steps you should take off the bat to get it prepared for fall. As it turns out, team member Kaleb Comstock and I have gotten a new piece of hunting ground down in Nebraska that we are extremely excited about and there’s a lot of work we need to do with it. Kaleb has hit the ground running, starting to get the property prepped to better our odds of shooting a mature buck in the fall. Follow along and learn with us, and just maybe you’ll pick up a few things you can be working on with your property along the way. - Alex Comstock
By Kaleb Comstock
As we turn the calendar to July, that means one thing. We are one month closer to opening day. In Nebraska, archery season opens up on September 1st. Time is ticking on finishing up our summer prep work to get prepared for the season. This year has us excited as we are tackling another new piece of property. A property we have high expectations for, the property we call “Plan B”. I picked up permission on Plan B in December of 2021. After running trail cameras there, it didn’t take us long to realize there was a big buck on the property we knew we wanted to focus on in 2022. A buck we call “Showtime.” I was able to find “Showtime’s” matching set of antlers in March when I was walking for sheds. This just grew our anticipation for hunting this property for the 2022 season.
Showtime’s matched set of sheds from 2021
The last few weeks I have been doing ground work on project Plan B. I established a mineral site and have hung a couple of trail cameras throughout the property. Though there hasn’t been any sign of “Showtime” we have gotten a handful of different bucks frequenting the mineral site. Going into this season, we knew we wanted to try and establish a good food source on the property outside of the surrounding agriculture fields. However, we knew it would not be easy and was going to require a lot of work to get one established.
Step one on plan B was to finish clearing out the opening for a food plot.
The first thing we had to do was figure out where would be a good place on the property for a food plot. Luckily, there was already a natural opening about ⅓ of an acre in size. This area already has pretty good natural deer traffic. Once we had the area established, we needed to go in and finish clearing small trees that were growing in the plot. Me and Alex were able to get this done earlier this year in the spring. After the plot was trimmed out, I could now go in and mow it down. With having access to very little equipment, my plan was to push mow the grass in the plot. Thank god for my friend, Seth, who was nice enough to let me borrow his riding lawn mower which saved me a ton of time and work. Not only was I able to mow the main plot, I also found another place on the property to mow for a second plot. Once the mowing was completed, I went in and sprayed the food plots with round up weed killer.
Getting the plot mowed and sprayed was one of the first summer to-do’s.
In the next few weeks, I will be going back to project Plan B to check on the plots to see how well they are dying off. Then I will need to rent a tiller to start tilling virgin soil. This is the part of creating the plot that I think will pose the greatest challenge. If all goes well, the ground will be tilled and ready for seed by early August so we can plant our fall plots that will be ready come November! Project Plan B is in full swing as we creep closer to the fall, day by day. The season will be here before we know it.
