It has been a strange early summer here in SE Iowa.  It’s hot, and we seem to be getting hammered with a thunderstorm about every-other day.  Being my first year having crops, I now know what the farmers go through.  The only difference is that I’m planting the food for the deer, and they’re relying on it for an income!  Every storm that comes barreling through makes me pray for no flooding.  I have a lower bean field that is most venerable, but I think for the most part, we’re out of trouble for the moment anyway.

Here are a few pictures of the beans that I’ve been so worried about!  They are actually looking very good.   I will have them sprayed with round-up in the next week or kill off the competitive weeds that are growing along-side my green late-July buck magnets!

Isn’t Dallas dreamy…  Not bad for a four-fingered nightmare!

White Knuckle Productions has also recently enlisted the help of a young man named Jacob that has been helping us out lately.  Jacob is able to catch both myself and Dallas (of the Ft. Worth Clan), out dinking around in the field.  It’s always handy to have an extra guy to help document the stuff, otherwise it’s always just one person if-front of the camera.  Jacob is catching on fast and having a good time roasting with us out in the 90 degree temperatures with us!

On the opposite side of the farm, the corn has been coming in very well recently!  The current height is about 2 feet, and growing on a daily basis.  The very interesting thing about corn in this particular field is that it is not only going to be providing food for the season, but it also provides great cover for whitetails.  I don’t think I have to tell you that big bucks LOVE the cover that standing corn provides. 

When this corn reaches its maximum growth, it’s literally going to turn normally not-exciting field-edge stand set-ups, into barn-burning smoking hot stands!  I have about a 20 ft. buffer strip of CRP (field grass) that surrounds the corn, and will provide the ultimate stand set-ups in the near-by tree-line.  This is a set-up that I can get excited about!

Here is a behind the scenes shot from our upcoming season…

The other major bonus about my set-up is that I have been mowing trails around my entire property to allow for easy and quiet access through the normally chest-high grass.  The major bonus with my network of trails is the traffic they direct past my stands.  I’ve mowed them in areas I plan on hunting so that I can hopefully put the deer within easy bow-shot of my stand set-ups.  This is the plan anyway.  We’ll see how this comes together this fall!  In the meantime, it allows me to sneak around my property without making any noise, and leaving a minimal amount of scent behind.

Growing Habitat…

I’ve also recently added a new tool to my scouting arsenal.  Straight-up, I’m like the luckiest guy in the world to have such a great view to my plots from my living room.  The problem is that the distance is about between 400 and 500 yards.  Even with the use of powerful binoculars, it becomes very difficult to make out details from this distance.  I finally changed this by bridging the distance with my new Vortex Skyline spotting scope.  It enables me to view the deer in my food plots with up to 60x magnification.  The other really cool thing about the set-up is that Vortex makes a digital camera adaptor that screws right onto the spotting scope.  This allows me to mount any digital camera and take pictures through the scope.  To be able to snap pictures of animals with a cheap digital camera at 400 yards and know what I’m looking at – man, what a tool for long-distance observation!

This is my new Vortex Spotting scope set-up.  It’s sweet!

Here is the digital camera mount for the spotting scope.  It allows for easy adjustment in the Vertical, Horizontal, and Rotational directions. 

Here are a couple pictures of a doe that was feeding in my clover plot last night.  She was over 400 yards away when I took these pictures.  How cool right?

It’s getting hotter everyday, and I’m getting more and more excited to see some good bucks hitting their top potential in the next few weeks.  I will be putting trail cameras out soon, and then we will start the countdown to the season.  I still have too much to do!  Everyone have a safe and enjoyable June, it’s almost over!