gzg38b

I've heard about pumpkin farmers who've lost their entire pumpkin crop due to deer damage. Now I'm thinking about planting a few pumpkins to see if it works. The deer around me have so many food choices - I want something a little different from the neighbors.What do you guys think?

MOTOWNHONKEY

Where I hunt the farmer grows pumpkins and sells them most years. I have never seen deer trying to eat the pumpkins. I did see them doing some cart wheels over in the bean and corn fields though.

excalibur43

Deer love pumpkins! They usually won't start eating them until after a good frost, when the pumpkins start wilting.

rankbull

I have had deer eating our pumpkins that we toss in to the woods after Halloween, deer will eat anything that a farmer dosnt want them to.

DaveH

I cringed when my neighbor decided to convert a small 2 acre cornfield next to me into a pumpkin/gourd plot for his kids for a roadside stand. Then I saw how the deer responded to it and quickly got over it!

It's true, they seem to come to it more readily once there's frost -- and most of the pumpkins are already gone by then, but they do seem to like them.

1sagittarius

Last summer I planted a strip of pumpkins between my sweetcorn and white clover field. We harvested about 70 pumpkins plus 8 five gallon buckets of decorative gourds.

Never sawevidance of thedeer bothering them much except before harvest when there was teeth marks in a couple. But with sweetcorn, soybeans, winter wheat, and white clover close by, the pumpkins seemed fairly safe.

Plant pumpkins for you not the deer, there are too many other plants the deer like better.

GR8RALLY

I agree with 1saqittarius. I think the small pumpkin patch that i'm going to grow this year near the cabin will be safe since I'll also have many other preferred "Deer Deli" food crops such as corn,soybeans,clover,chicory,brassica,lablab,sunfl owers etc etc etc. You get it.
So as stated by 1sagittarius, plant the pumpkins for yourself.

Good Luck.

Hawgnman

I'm thinking of planting some in my food plot. When do you plant them in north central NC?

fshafly2

ditto the experience -I'll leave some garden pumpkins in the fall for the benefit of the deer, but imho, its not worth the effort as a food plot component.
-fsh

doughboysigep

my uncle had a lot of problems with deer and his pumpkin crops. they would stomp them and eat the innards and not all of the pumkin, just some of it and then move on to another. He thought he the continuing problem, year to year, was that the fawns would be taught by their mothers to eat the pumkins and then continued the next year (and so on). Even though they like to eat the, I am not sure it would be my first choice for food plot. I would pick an proven winner (clover, soy, corn, etc)