H20fwler
5 year old buck +
About five miles from our bigger farm we have a smaller piece of land roughly eight acres that is mostly hardwoods that has a ten-fifteen yard wide border strip of switchgrass and clover that runs around it.
I planted a small orchard of twenty apple, pear and crabapple trees along the south end this past spring. There is a large river about two miles to the north and a creek that has water year round a mile to the south but no water source really close, this small woods is in a natural funnel between larger woods surrounded by agricultural fields of rotated corn, soybeans and wheat.
It is a flat out deer magnet, very thick with about every low growing plant, bush and tree with thorns and needles growing in it, it was logged about ten years ago and is a bunny paradise. I get some really nice pics of impressive bucks summer&fall and have does and fawns living in the woods year round.
What has bothered me is the property did not have it's own water source, sometime in the future I would like to buy another couple of acres butting up to it and put in a small pond, but I have too many projects going on for that just now.
So after reading all the great threads of you guys digging in wading pools, horse troughs and coy ponds to create small water holes and the awesome pics you all were getting I decided to try it. I started looking at Lowes and Menards pricing coy ponds. My plan was to buy one on Black Friday on sale and put it in early spring...then a couple weeks ago on my way to work I spotted a used one in a front yard that was 24" deep and maybe 8'X6' around for $50 and bought it.
So yesterday morning while my boys were in town we took it out and dug it in at the end of the orchard! Hopefully by next spring it will be full and the animals will start using it, I plan on keeping a trail cam on it to see how it does.
Big thank you to everyone on this site for the great idea.
My crew starting the hole for it;
The coy pond dug in along the edge of the woods;
We put it in at ground level, it was only about 72 degrees when we started digging into that hard dry clay but we all three sweated our butts off by the time it was finished!
It isn't practical for me to haul water in to it, I think it hold like 300 gallons, it is about four hundred yards from the road surrounded by standing corn so I'm going to let nature fill it.
I planted a small orchard of twenty apple, pear and crabapple trees along the south end this past spring. There is a large river about two miles to the north and a creek that has water year round a mile to the south but no water source really close, this small woods is in a natural funnel between larger woods surrounded by agricultural fields of rotated corn, soybeans and wheat.
It is a flat out deer magnet, very thick with about every low growing plant, bush and tree with thorns and needles growing in it, it was logged about ten years ago and is a bunny paradise. I get some really nice pics of impressive bucks summer&fall and have does and fawns living in the woods year round.
What has bothered me is the property did not have it's own water source, sometime in the future I would like to buy another couple of acres butting up to it and put in a small pond, but I have too many projects going on for that just now.
So after reading all the great threads of you guys digging in wading pools, horse troughs and coy ponds to create small water holes and the awesome pics you all were getting I decided to try it. I started looking at Lowes and Menards pricing coy ponds. My plan was to buy one on Black Friday on sale and put it in early spring...then a couple weeks ago on my way to work I spotted a used one in a front yard that was 24" deep and maybe 8'X6' around for $50 and bought it.
So yesterday morning while my boys were in town we took it out and dug it in at the end of the orchard! Hopefully by next spring it will be full and the animals will start using it, I plan on keeping a trail cam on it to see how it does.
Big thank you to everyone on this site for the great idea.
My crew starting the hole for it;
The coy pond dug in along the edge of the woods;
We put it in at ground level, it was only about 72 degrees when we started digging into that hard dry clay but we all three sweated our butts off by the time it was finished!
It isn't practical for me to haul water in to it, I think it hold like 300 gallons, it is about four hundred yards from the road surrounded by standing corn so I'm going to let nature fill it.
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