Blog Entries from the WeHuntSC.com blogging crew
I?ve learned that the first step in the creation of a food plot is to get what is called a ?soil sample?. This soil sample is nothing more than a zip-lock bag of dirt that is collected from the acreage where the envisioned food plot is going. Once the food plot acreage is selected, a soil sample must be collected from it in order to determine the PH levels in the soil. Since the land area will most likely be of decent size, it?s best to get a balanced soil sample. By balanced I mean that it?s best to get soil from the 4 corners of the food plot acreage + some from the middle. Once you collect all the soil, you mix it in the zip-lock bag. This way you are getting a uniform blend of soil over your intended food plot acreage.
This past weekend some of the WeHuntSC.com team members went coyote hunting with Terry Williams. Last deer hunting season we got a lot of coyotes on our game cameras and frequently see dead coyotes in the road on the way to and from a certain track of land. So, this year we decided to try to hunt some of these ?Wylie Coyotes?.
Terry's coyote decoy
Terry's custom coyote "Howl Call"
After I graduated college I went and played football in Finland. Yes, they do have football in Finland and yes it was very cold. To read more about my time in Finland simply go to www.ClintPatterson.net and hover of the Finland link and you can find all the info there. Anyway, I stay in touch with a lot of the Finnish guys from the team and we talk about the glory days and all that, but every now and then one of them will travel over to visit. Well Kim Gronlund traveled over to visit several of his friends in different states and he stopped in SC for a weekend to visit me.
The Disclaimer As we start the food plot journey I want to prepare you for what you will be reading in the coming year. You will be reading a web developer?s perspective on food plot creation and maintenance. I make no apologies for my elementary level of knowledge of food plots, soil samples, and everything else that goes along with it. The only kind of farms most computer guys get involved with are server farms. My adventure outside the box and into some level of ?farming? (because there will be tractors involved) will hopefully be a unique one for everyone.
Though, my inexperience and low level of understanding (of all things food plot creation) may benefit some younger readers or some of you macho guys out there who won?t admit that you don?t know something! I?ll gladly be your guinea pig and hopefully everyone can learn something from this? even if it is learning what not to do! For all I know, we may not even get the stuff to grow properly and we may post pictures of dirt where the food plot was supposed to grow. Though, with insight from Tecomate Seed?s Mike Lee and some others around town, I think we can get at least some roots to show through. I?ll keep my fingers crossed in the mean time.
Feel free to laugh, joke about my lack of awareness, and take shots at me on the message board or in responses to the blog entries. I?ll probably join you in mocking myself! So now that I?ve raised the bar to a new low, let?s get started with all of this.
The Plan We plan to have 3 different food plots in 3 different locations. Each food plot will feature a different Tecomate Seed product. We will monitor each food plot and have game cameras set up to get any images of activity that these food plots receive. Throughout the year we will post blog entries about these food plots and hope to include images along with them. We are also going to try to set up and "exclusion fence" which will keep a small area of the food plot from being touched by the deer so that we can compare and contrast what the plants would look like if the deer weren't eating them.
That is the general gist of it all. When the time comes to actually put the seed down, Mike Lee from Tecomate Seed is going to come to assist us in this process. As we mentioned in the initial blog post, Mike has agreed to host a session on Food Plot creation when he comes to Pageland. We are going to host this seminar and will provide more details as the time draws near. For more info on the seminar and session, contact Adam Smith
Now it's time to stop typing and get to working. More to come...
Regards,
Clint
This past weekend some of the WeHuntSC.com team members + a friend of mine from Finland got together and went to see our 2009 Deer hunting competition winners. This proved to be a long day as our winners were from Patrick, Columbia, & Aiken. It was good to get out and meet some new people and see some of South Carolina. A lot of times we are stuck behind computers so it was a good change of pace to get out and hear the winners? stories and get a different perspective.
In case you didn?t know the story, WeHuntSC.com launched in September of 2009. We weren?t exactly sure as to how the site would take among the hunting audience in SC. We have been surprised at the growth of the site and energy surrounding it. We are working hard on the back end to keep the site up and going and keep sponsorships coming in. It?s fun to do and we are trying to keep it interesting as much as possible. I wanted to communicate some of our web metrics to you all so that you can get a scope of the audience following the site & so that the competition winners know that there were more than 2 people looking at the site! Lol
Anyway, in the State of South Carolina we had 2,537 unique visitors from 70 cities
If you are curious as to which cities the dots represent or you want to know the frequency of visits per city, just DOWNLOAD THE STATE METRICS REPORT HERE We also got some attention of states other than South Carolina. To see which other states (40) that visited our site and the frequency with which they did, just DOWNLOAD THE NATION METRICS REPORT HERE Overall we had over 37,000 page views from 3,995 visitors.
So we are off the ground! We?re going to keep pushing and marketing and hopefully the site will grow even more. I?m going to update the site to a new, updated version of the site before too long. I?m excited about it, but still have some finishing touches/updates to get configured. Maintaining 2 sites at once is not an easy task! Also, we announced the competition winners today! Congratulations to Chad, Shannon, & Trent for winning our first annual competitions. We?re going to deliver their prizes to them next weekend and shoot some video of the winners to include in a future blog. Now back to the grind? thanks! CBP
First and foremost I would like to say that I hope you and yours had a very Merry Christmas! We had a good one and it?s always good to get to see family and be able to give gifts to the special people in our lives.
The beginning of J-Duck Chronicles
The sunrise over Winyah Bay
J-Duck's setup on the coast