What's your biggest mistake/regret with land management?

Applying triple 19 around the base of small trees expecting exponential growth. Nope, death and disaster.
When you say small trees, how small do you mean? Was it the first year they were planted? I’ve read that fertilizing saplings will kill them, but if your trees were older then I don’t want to make the same mistake.



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A big mistake i made 2014 was planting "upland" trees in "bottomland" and expecting them to grow

My creek bottom floods in winter and becomes grey concrete by mid summer

I have a flat bed trailer with a huge stack of several hundred tree tubes as a monument to my "dumbassedness"

bill

Bill, I wish you were closer I'd help your reduce your abundance of tree tubes. I just order 200 seedlings from the Oklahoma forests for my SW farm.


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Chip, "small trees" were a 2 year old oak, first year transplant. For 1 to 5 year old trees, slow release osmocote works wonders. Thanks to recommendations from this site, just started using triple 12 on 5 to 10 year old trees and that works well for them.
 
Chip, "small trees" were a 2 year old oak, first year transplant. For 1 to 5 year old trees, slow release osmocote works wonders. Thanks to recommendations from this site, just started using triple 12 on 5 to 10 year old trees and that works well for them.

Well thanks for the info, you might’ve saved me from making a big mistake some day!


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Thinking I could be friendly with neighbors and they would still be respectful of boundaries..... wrong!!!!! ..... wish I could go back and slap some sense into myself ten years ago


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My biggest mistake was trying to establish an apple orchard along with several chestnut trees on ground that tends to stay wet in the winter. I spent a lot of time and money learning a good lesson.
Another mistake I have made was letting a "friend" plant my CRP NWSG....big mistake...didn't get it planted until July and didn't get a stand in some fields.
I'm also beginning to think it was a mistake in planting NWSG...I just don't see much wildlife usage even where I do have a good stands.
 
My biggest mistake was trying to establish an apple orchard along with several chestnut trees on ground that tends to stay wet in the winter. I spent a lot of time and money learning a good lesson.
Another mistake I have made was letting a "friend" plant my CRP NWSG....big mistake...didn't get it planted until July and didn't get a stand in some fields.
I'm also beginning to think it was a mistake in planting NWSG...I just don't see much wildlife usage even where I do have a good stands.

I have had several acres of nwsg for a couple years now and jumped my first bedded deer out of it a month ago. They are more likely to bed in the johnson grass and fescue than nwsg. They will walk through it but wont stay long. Hardly anything uses it - rabbits, cotton rats, birds, etc. I like the looks of it, but I think it is the least utilized cover type on my place.
 
I've always thought the nwsg mix mixes neglected the native forbs that should be present. A mix of 4 grasses doesn't give the diversity that I think deer and other wildlife need, but when we are told how to prep a field for these grass mixes all competition is to be eliminated.
 
I wish I had not planted a bradford pear tree on my property,very invasive species.I had 2 cut one down 2 years ago after it broke in half and still getting suckers coming up,seriously thinking about cutting the other 1 down and having the stump ground and planting an American hardwood there.
 
Waiting so long to get woods logged, and logged HARD.

Our area lacks cover and brows. All the other improvements are gravy after that. Game changer that we waited about a decade too long to do.
X2. Diverse habitat in strips, open woods, clearcut, food plot, open woods, clearcut, food plot, "repeat" is hard to beat for deer.
 
I don’t know if I feel like it’s a regret since the whole journey with owning land is a lot of fun but if I had it to do over again I’d hire a consultant a year or two after I owned it

Missed some major things -power of water holes, thermal bedding, access, designing sanctuaries right, hunting smart,etc
 
My regret is planting 22 apple trees without putting any fencing around the trees for protection. I dug out the holes and put in good black dirt in place of the sandy soil prevalent on my land. The deer ate all but one of the trees the first year in. The sole survivor was girdled to death by a small buck during the next years rut.
 
My regret is planting 22 apple trees without putting any fencing around the trees for protection. I dug out the holes and put in good black dirt in place of the sandy soil prevalent on my land. The deer ate all but one of the trees the first year in. The sole survivor was girdled to death by a small buck during the next years rut.
I don't want to make fun of your sad tale but it is humorous in a way, almost a Pat McManus moment where a "small buck" thrashes the sole surviving tree with his little spikes, the ultimate insult. I think the reason this thread has been popular is because there's a little bit of each one of us in every story like yours. In the past I've planted trees and procrastinated protecting them, thinking I'll do it when I get time, only to find that the deer have been munching on them and killed a few, and I'm guessing quite a few of the others have made this mistake as well.
 
My biggest regret is not being 100% on top of all the species that were growing on my place. As I developed cover, there were some species that I didn't pay much attention to. I didn't know what they were, and I thought that they were adding to my cover so what could it hurt? PLENTY! Let some invasives get a foothold and you'll have an up hill battle for years to come.
Mile-A-Minute, grape vines, privet, oriental bittersweet, canada thistle are among the ones that I didn't squash and eradicate it as soon as it appeared.
Learn species identification and completely deal with the unwanted ones as soon as they appear. Don't take them lightly or you'll be sorry.
 
I don’t know if I feel like it’s a regret since the whole journey with owning land is a lot of fun but if I had it to do over again I’d hire a consultant a year or two after I owned it
Missed some major things -power of water holes, thermal bedding, access, designing sanctuaries right, hunting smart,etc

REPLY: I have had that thought also at times Bullwinkle; But then again some of todays consultants were just starting their own land journey at the time. And none of us had ever heard of such a thing as a deer management consultant. But as regards today there is no question a consultant can jump start a new landowners progress. Heck even after almost 60 years of hunting, Steve jump-started my deer hunting efforts in a good way as have many of the people on this forum as well as many from the old forum that are either no longer with us or are just not participating forum wise much.

If only I had been on the internet in my youth to connect up with people as crazy about this as you and I and the rest of this forum, there would have been a lot of improvements made many years sooner. Discussion and the sharing of ideas makes one plus one equal five. But then again back then 40K was a powerful computer and even FAX machines were still science fiction. In fact back then I was in a high level corporate meeting where the main corporation had bought it's first two fax machines, one for the parent company and another for one of its many subsidiaries; We faxed each other and all of the people in the meeting thought it was so cool but since we had the only two machines around--Like so what! If only I had known it was just one step closer to the creation of www.Deerhunterforum.com I would have jumped up and cheered and cheered and cheered some more!

And Tap, you are right on target about invasive plants; what today is just a minor curiosity or tomorrow a nuisance is a real problem in a few short years.
 
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