- Well, hey, everybody, welcome to "Michigan Out of Doors."

Thank you so much for joining us this week.

We have a brand new show for you.

We're gonna kick things off in the turkey woods.

Gabe Vanwormer has a really cool hunt to share with us on this week's episode.

And then we're gonna visit not a buck pole, but a turkey pole on this week's show.

We'll let you see what that was all about and we're gonna sit down with an expert when it comes to food plots, what you can be doing this time of year, some good tips on how to grow better food plots for the upcoming deer season.

Lots of good stuff on this week's show you stay tuned.

I'm Jimmy Gretzinger.

It's time for "Michigan Out of Doors."

♪ From the first spring rains to the soft summer breeze ♪ ♪ Dancing on the pine forest floor ♪ ♪ The autumn colors catch your eyes ♪ ♪ Here come the crystal winter skies ♪ ♪ It's Michigan, "Michigan Out of Doors" ♪ - [Jimmy] What a beautiful day in the woods.

♪ Some day our children all we'll see ♪ ♪ This is their finest legacy ♪ The wonder and the love of Michigan ♪ ♪ As the wind comes whispering through the trees ♪ ♪ The sweet smell of nature's in the air ♪ ♪ From the great lakes to the quiet stream ♪ ♪ Shining like a sportsman's dream ♪ ♪ It's a love of Michigan we all share ♪ - [Narrator 1] "Michigan Out of Doors" is presented by.

- [Narrator 2] By Country Smoke House.

A sportsman's destination since 1988.

Featuring varieties of homemade sausage, jerky, brats, and gourmet entrees.

Holiday gift boxes can be assembled in store or online.

Details at countrysmokehouse.com - [Narrator 3] By Angler Quest Pontoons.

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Angler Quest Pontoons are built with a multifunctional layout to support a variety of fishing adventures.

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Find more information at mid-michiganponds.com.

(mellow music) (sparks snap) (gun fires) (upbeat music) (gentle music) - Well, I can hear a turkey across the road, but I'm not hearing anything over on this side yet.

I've only heard that turkey a couple times, so hopefully, there are some turkeys back in here.

I haven't had a chance to do a whole lot of scouting, so I'm just going on history of where these turkeys usually roost.

So you got a lot of this time of year, the spring, birds waking up.

Just a nice time to be out in the woods.

Well, that one that was gobbling across the road is now, he's coming this way.

I am guessing he's coming to these hens over here.

I can hear some hens back in there and I can hear him gobbling across the road.

I'm guessing he's gonna come on across.

We'll see.

(gentle music) (Gabe calling) (gentle music) (Gabe calling) (Gabe calling) He's not moving.

That turkey is just over this hill and he's strutting with some hens, I'm sure.

I'm sure he is right on that field.

Sometimes it sounds like he's a hundred yards away, sometimes it sounds like he's 200 yards away.

I'm sure he is just facing that way, facing this way, facing that way.

And there's a hill in between me and him.

So at any time, if he decides to come, which I don't think he will, he could be on me before I know it.

So I can't really do a whole lot right now.

I don't have any other gobblers calling around me, so I'm just gonna kind of sit here and wait.

I'll be really patient.

It's really hard for me.

Oh, there he is, there he is.

I can see him coming.

(birds chirping) (wind blowing) (turkey gobbling) (birds chirping) (birds chirping) (birds chirping) (turkey gobbling) (birds chirping) (turkey gobbling) At this point, I could hear more hens behind the first hens that were coming in.

I could only hope that the gobbler would follow 'em through the woods.

(birds chirping) (turkey gobbling) (birds chirping) (wind blowing) (birds chirping) (wind blowing) (birds chirping) (birds chirping) (Gabe calling) (turkey gobbling) (gun fires) That was quick.

(Gabe laughing) I guess you gotta call it the hen studio.

The only gobbler that was gobbling this morning was one across the road.

You can hear the road behind me and he was gobbling like crazy.

There were some hens roosted back in this woods and he just beat foot through this woods and got there before I could.

And they were out on this wheat field and then the hens are going to nest.

There's a nesting area over this way and he was headed that way with them.

And I called in the hens, and I had him at, like, 15 yards right here and I've got the 20 gauge.

That was awesome.

I think I shot him at like 20 yards with a 20 gauge.

Oh my goodness, that was awesome.

That ought to be some cool footage.

He came strutting right over that hill, and when he got over the hill he was already in range, and it was hard for me to run the camera, focus on him and get the shot at the same time.

So I had to just kind of pick what I was gonna do.

I just kind of got my gun ready, and then I lifted up and turned, and he didn't even care.

He didn't even drop out a strut and he's dead right there.

Couldn't ask for a better hunt.

That was awesome.

Well, not bad at all.

I'll tell you what, that was a fun morning.

What a gorgeous bird.

Man, he is, kind of light colored tips on him.

That is a pretty bird, real nice beard on him.

I haven't measured it or anything, but that's just a fantastic morning here in Mid-Michigan.

Textbook hunt.

Call the hens in, gobbler comes right behind him.

Doesn't usually work like that, but I'm very, very thankful.

What an awesome morning.

It's been a while since I've shot one this big bodied, usually they're in that 18, 19 pound range, maybe 20.

This one is bigger for sure.

What a gorgeous bird.

You can't beat that.

- Well, special thanks to Gabe for sharing that hunt with us.

We have been out trying to get some more turkey action, so hopefully we'll have some more of that over the next couple of weeks.

We're gonna stay in that turkey vein right now because we heard about a turkey pole that was happening just outside of the Lansing area.

We thought we'd check it out.

(bright music) A couple of weeks back, we were able to spend the turkey opener near the town of Williamston.

The plan was to hunt for a few hours before heading to the local turkey pole to see how other hunters in the area had done.

- This is Nick Hischke with the Michigan Turkey Pole.

Here we are on opening day of turkey season, taking out Vince, our youth hunter here.

We were successful this morning with two harvests.

Me and my wife shot two beautiful toms this morning and trying for a third this morning.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (Nick calling) (bright music) (Nick calling) (bright music) - [Jimmy] The first couple of spots had plenty of birds, but we just couldn't get one to cooperate.

As we bounced around from spot to spot, we ended up finding a big group of turkeys in a wheat field and used a ditch to help close the distance.

- We were driving around, scouting, and we saw these birds out in this wheat field all hunkered up 'cause of the wind.

And now we're in this little low winds trying to get away from 'em so we can make an attempt on trying to get to them.

So we'll see how this goes.

We've been battling the wind all day.

It's 50 degrees, 25 mile an hour wind, so it's definitely makes it a challenge for us.

They are, they're coming.

Get down, watch your head.

Shoulder, shoulder, shoulder.

Right here.

Get your safety.

- Which one?

- Any of them.

Either of them, right here.

Just don't shoot.

Shoot the front.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Now.

(turkey gobbling) (gun fires) - [Nick] It's all right.

- [Jimmy] Well, unfortunately turkey hunting doesn't always go as planned and the occasional miss is just part of it.

After we wrapped up in the field, we headed to the turkey pole, to see how things were going there.

- Hi, I'm Wyatt Mazich.

We're at the Michigan Turkey Pole at the Williamson Roadhouse, April 18th.

It's been a great turnout.

We're at 90 birds and climbing, they keep coming in.

This is our second year doing it.

We started it last year for the first year and last year we had 70 birds entered.

We're around three to $4,000 worth of sponsorship money.

We four to five x that this year.

We're around $15,000 worth of sponsorships from awesome donors.

This year, we're gonna be giving away around 4 to $5,000 to a couple local families who've been going through a hard time.

We're super blessed to be able to put on an event like this and also just be able to give back.

And then just the support we have from the community is insane.

The turnout's insane.

Even for the weather we had today, we're well on track for over a hundred birds, and just super, super blessed and it's been a great day and I just can't say thank you enough to everyone that's come out, everyone that's supported this place, "Michigan Out of Doors" for being here, the Williamson Roadhouse for letting us have this event, and just blessed all around, and super excited to give away all these prizes.

- [Jimmy] As we made our way around the pole, we caught up with a few successful hunters.

- [Derrick] All right, my name's Derrick.

- [Mike] Hey, I'm Mike.

And we're here at the Williamson Roadhouse at the turkey pole for 2026.

This morning, we, for the first time, doubled up on some pretty fantastic birds and a friend of mine texted me about it.

And so we decided to make the drive all the way up from Muskegon.

- [Derrick] So we set up about, what was it, 6:45?

- 6:45.

- Within, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes, we had him gobbling off the roost, got him to cut me off once, shut up, and pretty much the rest is history.

We had three hens come running in, Jake behind him, and he was willing to shoot a Jake just for us to double up.

And I said, there's your Jake, here's my tom.

He goes, ah, no dude, there's another tom behind him.

And they come strutting in literally, six yards past us.

We had to wait for 'em to get out to 12 and it was nuts, dude.

We dropped 'em and it was sweet.

We freaked out.

I bet you anybody within a mile probably heard us.

So it was really cool.

- [Mike] Pretty wild celebration in the blind that morning.

- [Derrick] Yeah.

- Hey, my name's (indistinct).

Today, shot my first bird, went out, it was raining, called him right in, and took him out about 25 yards or so.

And yeah, I took him up here to the pole.

See how he does.

My bird has an inch and 7/8 spur, 28.3 pounds.

- My name is Riley West and our hunt was probably, I got it in the afternoon.

- 11:30.

- Yeah, something, kind of.

And.

- Look at the camera.

- And like the, and it had big spurs or whatever it's called.

- Spurs.

- [Riley] Yeah, whatever.

Potato, potato.

- We're at 118 birds, there's still more rolling in.

We're gonna be a little bit late on the announcements for a good reason 'cause the birds keep rolling in.

Next year, we're gonna keep going.

We're gonna make it even bigger and better next year.

More giveaways, more donations, more prizes.

The sky's the limit with this event.

And we want to let everybody know that this is for the people, by the people and everybody is welcome.

Anybody's welcome to sponsor.

The sponsorship money is a hundred percent donated to our donation families.

And you know, I gotta say a special thanks to all my friends and family that they came out and they're here setting up extension cords, setting up tents, doing things for nothing, just because they wanted to do it out of the goodness of their heart so.

And it could not happen without them so thank you so much to everyone that's helped.

You know who you are.

- [Jimmy] A great event with a great turnout, all for an even better cause.

Thanks to Nick and Wyatt for inviting us out.

It was a great day here in southern Michigan.

Well, another pretty popular activity this time of the year here in the spring is getting your food plots ready for the upcoming deer seasons.

We thought we'd sit down with an expert to give you some good tips and tactics on things you can do to improve your food plot this year.

(bright music) Well, we are here today with Justin Morgan, Morgan Composting.

We've done some stuff with you over the years, kind of, this is the food plot guru.

Before we get started with, kind of, what is happening this time of year, we're here early May, what guys should be doing, tell me a little bit about this man cave here.

- Yeah, so this is my dad's man cave and you know, it's an accumulation of our family, and you know, we work hard, but we like to play hard too, and we call it our therapy.

So we work together all the time so we go hunting together just to keep that going.

- [Jimmy] So obviously you hunt all over the world then.

- [Justin] Yeah, we try to take a trip together.

You know, we enjoy each other's company even though we work together a lot.

Dad and grandpa and I - Nice.

- still try to do that.

- So this time of year, early May, like we said, what should guys be doing?

What are they doing right now if you're looking for a food plot that's gonna be ready for the hunting seasons.

- Yeah.

Right now, May it's kicking off now.

We have our food plots that we had from last year.

It really depends on what you did last year, what you're gonna do this year.

- Hmm.

- The first thing I like to talk to guys about is their pH.

You know and that's first and foremost.

If you look at a pH chart, it's 6.2 to 6.8 is that optimal pH is where you want your soil to be.

And the reason is, if you look at that nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, all your micros, all your copper zinc, your minerals, they release in that 6.2 to 6.8.

So we wanna balance that soil to 6.2 to 6.8.

- So do you get a soil sample every single year to see kinda where you're at, or once you do it once, is it pretty much good to go?

- Yeah, I do it every year, but a lot of guys could do it every other year.

And as far as just a pH test, you can do that with a little strip, you can do that with a little meter.

Are pretty cheap, you can buy that.

- Okay, you can just do that yourself.

- You can, yeah.

- Okay.

- You can go out there and do that.

And then it's just grabbing them right 'em amount of lime.

So if you're at a five pH, the rule of thumb to raise it up to six, you need two ton of lime.

So it's quite a jolt to get on there, to get that balance to get to where we need to go.

The nice thing with lime though, once you get it balanced to that 6.2 to 6.8, it stays pretty true.

You don't have to do that every single year.

- Okay.

- So.

- And then, so are you putting seed in the ground soon or already should have done that or?

- Yeah, no, right now if you're gonna do a new food plot, it's lime first and I want to get it balanced.

After you get the lime down there, you know, I like to make sure you rotate that in.

And I do have guys come to me all the time, like, I need to put lime down.

And I'm like, why do you wanna put lime down?

He's like, well my dad did and my grandpa did.

- Hmm.

- Just because they did, they might have been right then when they did it, but they may not be correct now.

So I tell guys too, if you don't wanna do a strip test or whatever, you can look at your ferns.

If you have ferns in your food plot, that's usually like a 4.5 or 5 pH, maybe a four.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

And you do a lot of seminars and different teaching opportunities.

What are some things that you hit on, what are some common mistakes that people make when they're doing food plots?

Either for the first time or they're just, just getting into last couple years?

- Yeah, I think the biggest thing I see is guys, they go into this wide open area and they're like, eh, this is great.

Mother nature left this just for me, right?

This is awesome.

Well, she hasn't grown anything there for 200 years, so now we gotta realize and accept the fact that that soil is, something's wrong with that.

- Okay.

- Otherwise she'd have stuff there other than grasses.

So knowing that's probably one arm's tied behind our back a little bit with the fertility side.

- Okay.

- So we need to adjust the fertilizer before we talk about the seed.

- Okay.

And then talk to me a little bit about, you know, Michigan has three distinct zones.

So what, you know, Southern Michigan stuff, Northern Michigan, UP, how do you, what do you say to those?

You know, especially the guys that are up northern and in the UP.

- Yeah.

And that's one thing we get, we get from all over the state, guys in Ohio and North Carolina and everywhere, and that the soil is wild.

You can have sand on one side, and gravel on the other, and clay on the other.

But the guys that, like the Kalkaska, Traverse City, the sand dune side is just like, can I put a volleyball court there or a food plot, right?

Like, it's that sandy.

And we can have products that can help overcome that after time.

You know, guys that own their property, it's a marathon.

We have to realize this isn't gonna happen overnight.

This is something, we have this property for a long time and then we have fertilizers built that we put carbon sources in to help build that soil and that sandy ground up.

- [Jimmy] And then, so once you get the soil kind of where you want and then what, how do you coach guys on which seed to put in?

I mean there's so many different stuff in the market.

I know you guys make, you know, have seed blends.

How do you kind of figure out what would grow best in that spot?

- Yeah, once I find out, kind of the size of it dictates what I recommend.

If you've got a small food plot, we need a lot of food per square inch.

So we have different clover blends that we can put out there and the idea is once that starts growing up, and we can get that established, clover and alfalfa acts kinda like your lawn.

So as you clip that, or the deer come in and eat that, it grows through that and it can keep growing.

So if I got a smaller area, I like to see clover in that plot and it's timing of year when we put this in, not necessarily seed choice 'cause we kind of design a seed for Michigan anyways, no matter if you're Sturgis or the UP.

And then I ask guys too all the time, especially on small food plots, I wanna see a control.

Meaning, put three T-posts in.

- Okay.

- With chicken wire around it.

Because we can go batty, trying to put all this work into it, do the rain dances, make sure the fertilizer's right, do all this, and then it's ate down to the dirt, right?

- Wow.

- And the good thing is deer are coming and eating that.

The bad thing is that we may think that there may be something wrong.

If we do a control in the center that should be lush growing through that chicken wire and tall and the rest of it's ate down to dirt, then we know we either gotta take some more does, we gotta clear some more property, we gotta put some more food on our properties because there's just not enough.

- Talk to me a little bit about the fertilizer part of it.

I don't think someone who's not super familiar with growing my own food plot, how important is the fertilizer aspect of the whole?

- Yeah, that's the engine to everything.

- Okay.

- I got guys telling me all the time they wanna plant all these expensive seeds and trust me I do too.

But unless we get the soil right, the seed doesn't do anything without the soil in my opinion.

So whenever we're picking fertilizers, there's a couple things I focus on.

And one thing that I did years ago that I think it helps with the light bulb.

I put three cap fulls of our food plot do in this bottle here, and three cap fulls of a salt based fertilizer.

- Okay.

- And the reason I did that is because guys buy this Triple 19, which is 19 nitrogen, 19 phosphorus, 19 potash, right?

- Okay.

- Triple 19, that's NPK.

Ours is at 8-4-4 NPK, right?

- Okay.

- So initially, as males we all, we're tough, we drag our knuckles on the ground, we buy the best.

- The bigger the better.

- Yeah, exactly.

So the 19 is more attractive.

The problem with the 19 is it's salt based.

- Okay.

- So when you put salt in your soil and you've got low organic.

I've looked at thousands of soil samples, and most of 'em are less than 2%.

So that means you got 2% of little sponges in there that can hold onto nutrient.

Well, you're putting 19 on your ground, you're buying 19, but how much can your soil hold?

- Okay.

- When the ground and when the crop needs to start pulling from that, your roots.

So this, a lot of this will leach through into our aquifer, right?

So we wanna be more stewards of the land, we wanna make sure that we put the right product in place that has organic matter in there.

And you can see this is our product here.

So what I like about this is that thick layer of organic matter on the bottom, it's gonna stick.

And now we're gonna start creeping our organic matter up a little bit.

And you can see this isn't gonna leach like the salt based fertilizer does through our soil.

We wanna hold it in our soil.

Most of our crops will be that six or eight inches.

That's where the grow zone is.

That's where we want our fertilizers to stick.

So even though it's a smaller number, it performs at a higher level because it's in zone and it's around those roots when they're ready to feed.

- Well, hey everybody, thank you so much for watching "Michigan Out of Doors" this week.

If you miss part of this week's show or if you wanna see something again, you can always check us out online, michiganoutofdoorstv.com is the place for that.

Also, Instagram and Facebook, you can see kinda what we're up to on a day to day basis.

And while you're at our website, we actually have for you trout fishermen out there, the Trout Opener that just happened a week or so back.

We've got a special edition trout T-shirt.

I tell you what, it's pretty cool, you might wanna check that out.

And there's a lot of things happening around the state right now and make sure that you get out and enjoy everything our state has to offer.

And if we don't see you in the woods or in the water, hopefully, we'll see it right back here next week on your PBS station.

- [Narrator 1] Michigan out of doors is presented by.

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With GreenStone's Recreational Land loans, we'll help you finance acreage of any size so you can own your own place in the great outdoors.

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- [Narrator 1] By Great Lakes Firearms and Ammunition.

A family owned and operated firearm manufacturer in Spartan, Michigan.

Offering a wide variety of calibers and colors backed by a lifetime warranty.

More information available at glfallc.com.

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Providing defense and civil security products and services for over 85 years, and now part of the Grayling community.

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More information as saabinc.com.

By GreenMark Equipment.

GreenMark Equipment is a John Deere dealership network in Southwest Michigan and Northern Indiana.

GreenMark provides sales and services to farmers, commercial businesses, large property owners and homeowners.

Information about pricing and products available can be found online at greenmarketequipment.com.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) ♪ When I wander far way (gentle music)