3 Deer Hunting Tasks to do Before Opening Day 🦌

Alright you guys, welcome back to a brand new video. I must say, last night the temperature got a lot cooler and it's getting me so so excited. Opening day for hunting season is right around the corner but we still have so much left to do to get prepared. So if y'all want to follow us along today on the farm to see the three things that we're going to be doing today to get prepared for opening day, stay tuned and follow along. Also if you guys haven't already, use the link below to shop the farmhouse kitchen where we have our opening day seasoning that's going to get your pantry stocked up before you fill your freezer. Without further ado, let's head into the woods. There he is. Ready to go move some stands? Oh yeah, ready as I'll ever be. Gotta get prepared. Let's do it. Don't let this fool you guys, we're gonna be getting to work. Getting sweaty. It's gonna be hot, sweaty, ticky. Ticky, snakey. Ready for them. I think I can run that over. Things are a little bit grown over. That's as far as we're going. Alright y'all, so first order of business is go on and seeing what the heck stands are even up because last year we really only used like one or two and we want to have a couple more options this year and we've got several stands that are not in great locations or we just kind of want to move them to another place so this is one of them. Right up here we're gonna have to walk our way up because we've got a down tree here. Hopefully we can just drag this thing out pretty easily and then we're gonna show y'all where we're moving it to. Let's go up and see what we got. Alright let's go. So this you guys is what we call the spring bottom because this has a little spring that flows underground that feeds into the pond but used to have a lot more water but hopefully one day we can get that fixed back up and have a nice little trickle coming down through here because having a spring is pretty much like having liquid gold. How long ago was that we bush hogged this little area? Probably three months or so. Three months? Yeah. Maybe not even that long. It's still pretty short. We got this huge autumn olive tree right in the middle. That thing has gotten massive. Now that I'm here I kind of like this as a sneaky little spot. What? Holy cow. That has to be the megabuck. My gosh. Look at the size of this poop and it's fresh. I'm gonna pick it up. Look at that. I didn't even know deer could do that. That is a giant. Y'all this is disgusting but look at that. The size of that deer poop is insane. I think we should keep this stand here. Y'all look at this. It's just leaning forward but it's facing the wrong way. Yeah like face that way but so this is the stand right here. Y'all I wasn't expecting this to be so open and the the deer poop that's here is pretty promising so having that little stand just right on the outside of this clearing just I mean it would be really cool to actually have a successful hunt right here because you have such an open space there's really not that much room for error for shooting lanes or anything like that. This would be a good early season spot. Unfortunately we don't have any food plot here or anything this year but obviously the deer are still traveling through here maybe to make their way down to the pond which is just right down there. Just be careful because that thing has been up there for years. What? Oh god. What? Oh no. What? Bees? There's a huge wasp nest under there. Oh my god. We need to go get the uh spray. Okay. Okay guys we we are armed now. We've got some hornet and wasp spray. Hopefully no one gets stung here. There's about a hundred wasps. I can see it right there. Oh my gosh. While that's marinating our little hornets are crossing the rainbow bridge. We're just kind of scouting around this little area so when we're checking stands to make sure we want to keep them there or move them. We're also obviously scouting and trying to figure out where any deer are coming in and out of this little area. All of our autumn olive trees this year are just chock full of these little berries. These are actually edible. They'll get really sweet once the weather starts getting cooler. So we'll hopefully have some of these to harvest for jams and jellies. Autumn olive is an invasive species here in Virginia though so it definitely really helps if you do want to harvest the berries. It'll try to keep the population down a bit but they are notorious spreaders. They will take over your property. It's kind of a toss-up like they've got delicious berries and they help feed the wildlife but it is an invasive species so I have a feeling this autumn olive with how big it's gotten and it's kind of like a focal point here in this little field this could very well become a little scent marking area like a licking branch or a scrape ground scrape area for the deer hopefully fingers crossed that'd be great because our stand placement is just right over there and it's a clear shot to that tree. All right guys so we've got it turned a lot better than it was and we're just re-tightening the ratchets and I think this is going to be a pretty nice little stand. It is pretty short, pretty low to the ground which is the one thing I don't like but we've got so many branches right above the seat there that we can't really take it up any higher. Don't do this at home because we don't have a ratchet strap yet up here on the top of the platform so this is actually pretty dangerous. It is leaning forward a little bit but there's really nothing we can do. We do have some tree limbs to cut but I like this and we got a little shooting bar. I'm not hating on the crossbow that's pretty slick. All right good job babe one and done right? Yep heading on. I think we made the right call by leaving it and not moving it somewhere else. I think this could be a little sleeper spot but we've got one more place to go check. All right y'all so since Andy did most of the work on that tree stand I'm gonna take one for the team here and saw this little tree down that's covering our pathway. All right y'all we are down here in what you might call the cedar grove. We put a tree stand down in this bottom two years ago I believe and we never used it. It's really not in a very good spot so we're gonna take it down and we're gonna move it somewhere better. Checking stand locations, moving stands. Y'all we are still in such a bad drought here that this little creek bottom is completely bone dry. Well be careful. Make sure you check. Oh I don't like this. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh I do not like that. Are y'all's palms sweating because mine are? What are you gonna do? Oh stereotypical woodsman. Well you guys I would not recommend doing that to anybody. That was extremely dangerous. I'm not a fan of that style of stand especially the ladder. Only ladder stands, climbing stands, or maybe a saddle for us. We're not using anything like that. It's not worth it. No. It's just not worth it. But at least we got it down and we got the safety harness. All right you guys so we just made it back to the farmhouse. I needed a little break. It's actually getting hot out here. We're still pushing upper 80s today unfortunately. So between that and how unsafe that last clip was, I think we're done with the tree stands for today. And now the fun part. We're gonna go check some trail cameras. I'm excited. You think we're gonna see anything? If the camera worked. Oh yeah. You guys remember this is the spot where a few videos back we had put out some trail cameras and we haven't shown you guys any of this footage yet or we haven't checked it ourselves. But we did put this one. This is behind the barn and there's an old salt lit coal near this camera. So it should be something interesting. I don't know about y'all but Andy and I've been saying how much we miss like the old school cameras that were just simple. They had one function. Take pictures and you'd have to go check the cards. A lot of these that we have they are cell phone compatible but it never seems to work. And it's quite expensive. It's like 20 bucks a camera. So I just kind of prefer to do the old method. What do you think? I agree 100 percent. All right we got it. Let's go. All right guys we're at camera number two and this one is on this massive trail right here which we've discovered it is heavily used a lot by cows but deer too. Yes path of least resistance going through here. Guys I feel like trail cameras are such a privilege to be able to have. I mean if you think about the way the Indians used to do it uh which I always like to think about. But I mean at the very least for me it's more just getting you excited for the season because even if we did see a bunch of target bucks or one target buck the likelihood that he's gonna stick around here for a long period of time when the season starts is pretty slim. They kind of change their paths and what they're gonna be doing at certain times of the year. So I don't know for me it's just like exciting to just see what's around. So I feel like a lot of people especially nowadays will use trail cameras to just like track deer especially if they're hunting in the cities or neighborhoods. I don't know I'm kind of talking about like certain channels that you see. Yeah they rely solely on their trail cameras. Yeah they have like maybe like I don't know 20 cameras out in like a couple acre land area and then it all goes to their phone. Plus they're in a place with cell phone service so they're literally like able to track the deer as it's coming before you even see it. Which I think is totally cheating. It kind of takes the thrill out of the hunt. Yeah it's like completely like uh using live scope on your bass boat. Exactly. Same thing. Not hating just making an observation and um I don't know comment below if you guys feel the same way. Hopefully we're not talking about you. Live reaction. That was a bust. That sucks. No bucks on that one. Just some fawns, some does, some raccoons, and a bear. He's nice. Look how pretty he is. He's perfectly symmetrical. He's got some pretty tall brow tines too. Oh I like him. It's pretty. He is a pretty deer. It's a nice deer. It's a pretty big deer. Yeah he's pretty. Well y'all that was pretty uh anticlimactic unfortunately. We have definitely seen a lot more activity on some other trail cameras so we just hadn't checked these in a while. All right so so far we have uh checked some tree stands, moved some tree stands, taken some down, checked our trail cameras, and now we're gonna cook a little lunch and show y'all opening day seasoning recipe. I'm starving so let's make something to get everyone excited for opening day. All right you guys it is time for a nice fall hunting season inspired meal. And what screams fall more than chili? Crock pot chili. So what I've got here is pretty much all my ingredients all laid out. I'm not gonna bore y'all too much with the preparation and chopping and all that but I will leave down below in the description of this video if you're interested. This is our favorite foolproof chili recipe and y'all gotta try it. So here we've got one of our last packs of venison deer sausage. Gonna be using that, browning that up nice and brown first in the pan with of course some of our opening day seasoning y'all. And then I'm gonna be chopping up all these beautiful garden tomatoes instead of using some canned tomatoes. We've got some fresh garden tomatoes here. I'm also gonna be throwing in some miscellaneous peppers being that we have so many still out there. I've got some of these mild sargentos. I'm gonna dice those up and I'm probably only gonna use one of these. These are our JRG super spicy peppers. My mouth is watering. Because this is a bigger dish I might be able to use two. We'll see depending on how spicy we want it. And then Andy also went out to the garden and just picked this beautiful sweet pepper. So really heavy on the peppers but honestly you can you can tweak that however you like. We've got an onion here. I'm gonna dice up this medium onion and to add a little bit of a balance with how spicy it's gonna be I'm gonna put in some of our beautiful frozen garden corn. We harvested all of our corn just a few weeks ago and I just blanched it, took all the kernels off and vacuum sealed them into packs. So we've been absolutely loving using that in a lot of recipes. It's so so delicious but that'll add our sweetness. And then I've just got some black beans. That's what we're going with. That's what we had in the pantry and some pinto beans. I've also got some minced garlic here. Can't forget the garlic. And then I've also got some chili powder and some paprika. So we're gonna keep it really really simple but first things first we gotta get this meat browned up so we can get all of those drippings into our crock pot. Get a nice crust on this thing. That is super super important and I'm I'm gonna go pretty heavy with this opening day seasoning on here to start because when you are working with a big meal like chili or spaghetti sauce or a roast you can go pretty heavy on this stuff. It's it's bold but it's also mild enough that you can use a lot and and build your flavor profile without adding too much sodium especially. So let's get this browned up. You can't go out. It's too hot. You've been out all morning fishy. There is the opening day crust that I was talking about. That is what you want. Next we're just gonna put our brown sausage right into our crock pot. My lord that's heavy. And make sure you get all those drippings and seasonings. That's gonna be our flavor baby. All right so we've got our medium onion chopped and our garlic. This is y'all so easy. Y'all I'm sure have made chili before um and everyone has their own way that they do it. Things that they add and um or a secret ingredient and I must say our secret ingredient is the opening day seasoning. Trust me. Garden corn going in. All right y'all so we've got our beans in the crock pot too. Now I'm gonna add our spicy jrg. I only did one because I did leave the seeds in so it's gonna be hot. Now normally when I cook um here in the farmhouse I have a few recipes that I like don't really change but a lot of times our meals are like just on a whim and most of the time those are the best meals or the ones that Andy loves the most. So it's always just like an experiment in the kitchen and because I did just add that hot pepper what made me think about that is I think I want to add a little bit of coconut sugar. For now um we've got the sweet bell pepper going in and how many tomatoes did you? Four. About four or five four or five garden tomatoes all in. Look how pretty. So I am gonna add some more coconut sugar just because I mean who doesn't love a little bit of a sweet spicy chili. Um our seasoning does have coconut sugar in it but I wanted a little a little sweeter. Maybe about two tablespoons and then going back in with our opening day and we'll probably add about two tablespoons of this as well. You cannot have chili without chili powder of course. I'm gonna add some of that in there too. We're gonna do a little bit of smoked paprika just for that smoky flavor and some more color. Take a look at this. Come in. Look at all those nutrients in there. This is gonna be so good y'all. All right y'all we are done. It's that easy and now for the rest of the day I'm gonna be thinking about this chili. We'll be sure to do a taste test for y'all when it's ready. I'm gonna set this thing you could either do low for like six or seven hours or we could do high for three or four. Oh they have a it has a chili function. Didn't know that. We'll see y'all back here in two two and a half hours. It's dinner time you guys and our chili is smelling so good. Let's give it a look. Oh look at that love. All of that goodness. Let me tell y'all something. This may not be your way you do chili and that's okay. Everybody has their favorite chili recipe but here we love this especially for hunting season because it is so packed full of protein and nutrients and it will keep you going all day long from morning hunt all the way to an evening hunt and you're gonna know that you've gotten everything you need in this one bowl right here because this is on the healthier side of chili. There are no fillers, no artificial preservatives, there's absolutely no junk in our seasoning. If you guys know me and Andy we have both done a lot of brand deals and advertisements before. This is not one of those things. This is our baby that we created. We spent a lot of time because we were tired of every time we would cook it'd adding a bunch of different seasonings to one dish so we consolidated that into one seasoning. Not only that though, we were tired of seeing natural flavors or artificial ingredients on our seasoning bottles and a lot of bad seed oils, a lot of caking agents and things that are so it's like if you're hunting and you're going out to harvest your own food, grow your own food even, the last thing you want to do is taint your dish at the end with some seasoning that's not equivalent to the time and the effort that you put into the hunt and the harvest. So that's what we have and I love it and I can't wait to share all of this love with you guys. I can't forget the cheese. I personally like some a little bit of Greek yogurt on there and then we're gonna dig in. Thank you dear Lord Jesus for this meal. Thank you for the harvest. Thank you for providing. Thank you for guiding and can't wait for the next season and we just appreciate you in our lives. Amen. All right, gotta get a little bit of everything in there. I hope I don't burn my mouth. Are you drooling behind the camera? Andy approved. We're gonna turn this thing off, wrap it up and I hope you guys try our seasoning, try this recipe and we're so excited to keep pumping out some hunting and outdoor content for you guys. So stay tuned. We'll see you in the next one.