Tax Day, Gardens & Food Plots
By Mike Faulk


The older I get, the more I find myself quoting or at least recalling the words of my father. The transformation of an angry young man who vowed and declared to be "nothing like him" to a more matured middle-aged man who now has a better understanding of the wisdom of his old man is, indeed, remarkable.

Even though many of our neighbors would get a head start, Dad had a hard and fast rule about "putting out" our garden: "not before tax day." Over his seven decades, he watched many anxious friends loose a prematurely planted garden to a late snow or frost. While winter is usually long gone, I remember a big snow here in the hills on April 19th I believe it was.

Easter weekend's snowfall reminded me of Dad's rule. While my dogwoods were beautiful and the daffies divine, a few tillers were heard above the drone of lawn mowers in the days before the snowfall. And this weekend, while it won't snow here at 1200 feet elevation, they may get more snow in the higher elevations.

So it's tax day and now I'm clear under Dad's rule to put out a garden. Since I live alone I use earth boxes here at the house to grow the veggies I want for the summer. I'll plant tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, onions, zucchini, lettuce, okra and green peppers in my ten earth boxes. They require only consistent watering. There's no plowing, weeding, spraying, or other maintenance necessary.

The same cannot be said for the Strum Island food plots. We usually devote one or two of the smaller plots to a spring planting so we can maintain a presence of deer throughout the year. A shady blend of clover is a good investment now.

This past week I read an article in "Fair Chase", the Boone and Crockett Club magazine, that has me thinking. The biologist who wrote the article warned against food plots. His thesis was this: food plots are to deer as candy is to kids. Food plots spoil their appetite for what grows naturally. Concentrating deer in small areas containing food plots will, in the long run, hurt - not help - the deer population because of the increased risks for disease amongst a concentrated herd.

Some more though will have to go into that article. Carving the plots out of what were previously woods and thickets was labor intensive. I'm not sure I want to reinvest that sweat equity for the sake of an experiment.

Perhaps putting nothing out at all for the whole year would be a good test. We could at least measure whether there's a decrease in deer traffic during the fall hunting seasons. Surely a return to nature for just one season wouldn't require so much work to reopen the candy store.

We've had food plots for over 10 years now. What will happen if we take their candy away?

I'll think about that some more after I finish my 11th hour income tax return. And, like Pavlov's dog, I'm itching to "put out" some garden.