In my quest to quickly develop into a forester, I’ve had to make many decisions for which I was not well prepared.

Many of them worked out for the best, while others (see below) did not.

I won’t be bragging about my good decisions, but I thought you might enjoy reading about the things that I consider mistakes. If I could do it again, I’d do them differently. I’m probably blind to some mistakes, and there may be some mistakes on my list that in time will prove to be the right decision. Oh well…enough qualifiers.

1. Failing to appreciate the magnitude of this project.

I really did not have a good understanding of how big 33 acres is.

My home sits on about a quarter of an acre, but the forest is more than 100 times bigger than that. I didn’t understand that with a forest of that size, you really need heavy equipment to do anything significant.

I know my ancestors didn’t have heavy equipment, but they had many hands, domesticated animals, and probably less grandiose plans for their forests.

The main consequence of this mistake is that any time I have planned some forest activity, I consistently underestimated the cost, duration, and resources needed to make it happen.

2. Trusting the Assembly Instructions for the Picnic Table.

I pretty much just put the bolts where they said to put them, not considering the possibility that the bolt holes might be misaligned (as they were).

I ended up with an uneven table.

That would have been a huge problem if I were setting the table on a smooth, even surface, like a backyard patio or a deck. But because I was setting the table on the uneven forest floor, no one except me (and now you) knows that it is uneven.

3. Failing to have a realistic plan for sheltering the Gator.

I had a mental image of me roaming the forest in an ATV, and the John Deere Gator seemed just right for that.

After purchasing the Gator, I needed insurance for it, and some sort of shelter. I purchased a large tarp, and my plan was to wrap it around the Gator. In retrospect, I should have realized that the tarp would simply not have provided the degree of shelter needed for the Gator.

So I abandoned the tarp plan and instead built a Garage in a Box.

But this, too, proved to be insufficient shelter for the Gator.

In the end, I decided to just go ahead and build a garage to shelter the Gator and provide storage for all my other accumulating tools. But I wasted time, energy and some money in messing around, when I probably should have just gone directly to the garage plan.

4. Failing to understand the best way to use Roundup.

Glyphosate (Roundup) is a herbicide and hugely useful in controlling unwanted species in the forest.

It doesn’t hurt trees, but kills anything else with leaves. My problem was that I didn’t understand how best to use it, and didn’t know that I didn’t know.Everyone I encountered who gave me advice, assumed I knew how to use Roundup.

They were wrong about that.

I didn’t hurt anything from my lack of knowledge, but it took several hours on the internet and reading the labeling to get me up to speed.

Once I understood how best to use it, it proved to be highly effective in clearing invasive species and weeds. All I lost was the time I had spent floundering around with pre-mixed bottles of Roundup that I sprayed ineffectively on my weeds.