When out walking our dog (not on the homestead) this year I have noticed a large amount of acorns have dropped from the oak trees in our area. I decided to have some fun and try to grow an oak tree from seed. The main reason behind this is because we have about 3-5 mature oak trees on the homestead, but I have never seen any acorns on the property. It was slightly confusing because near the oak trees are some oak saplings, implying that the mature trees are dropping acorns at some point. I originally thought it was a product of me not being there very frequently and the squirrels collecting them before I see them. There was also the chance they were not dropping acorns at all, and the new trees were from some acorns of other trees the squirrels had buried there. Turns out that neither of those explanations was correct 😀 Fun fact about oak trees: they only drop their acorns every 2-3 years. This was very exciting information as now there is a chance I could find some acorns on our homestead!
I wasn’t planning to go up to the homestead for a while, so I picked up a few acorns from a local park and decided to try my hand at growing them. There are two reasons for this: First, I would like to eventually get into woodworking and some personal oak wood would be fantastic. To get some useful wood though, you need a mature tree 😀 They say the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago…and the second best time is today. Since we don’t have time machines yet it looks like today is as good as it gets 🙂 Secondly, I intend to grow different varieties of fruit (apple, cherry, etc.) and nut (walnut, chestnut, etc.) trees on the homestead and some extra practice usually never hurts.
I always get a certain joy when growing plants, and that joy is multiplied when I grow a plant all the way from a seed. I have started many of our vegetable plants from seed over the last couple of years, but I have only tried to grow a tree from a seed once. A few years back I had eaten a few avocados, and instead of just throwing the seeds away I wanted to try to grow an avocado tree from the seed just to see if I could. Turns out I could and it was quite the experience! First there was trying to get the seed to germinate by keeping the bottom half in water.
When a couple of weeks went by without any progress I decided to just plant a different seed in dirt. You know, like how nature does it 😀
I had success with this method, and after a couple of months we had a sprout!
I started the tree in the spring so there was plenty of time for me to worry about what to do in the winter. I wasn’t sure I would even be able to keep it alive until winter. This worry was in full effect when the tree got a little larger and leaves started to twist and curl around each other.
Turns out the tree was starved for water which causes it to do this. Who knew there was a way to communicate with plants! 😀 It is times like these where I can truly appreciate the awesomeness of nature.
We got the leaf twisting thing taken care of, and actually kept the tree alive until winter! We decided to see how far we could go with the tree, so we made space in a corner of a room inside. Unfortunately, this did not last long as there were some small flies that had laid their eggs in the soil while it was outside. Turns out they are also not a fan of Minnesota winters. When the flies hatched, and we realized where they were coming from we had to say goodbye to the avocado tree. Mark my words: I’ll be back again to finish what I started. One day I will grow an avocado tree to maturity. I can be very persistent sometimes 🙂
With that experience in hand, I decided to start the acorns in small containers of seedling mix. The first step in the process is to eliminate the bad acorns. This is done simply by placing the acorns in a bowl of cool water and eliminating the ones that float. The acorns that float are usually bad due to acorn weevils. They eat the acorn from the inside, and then bore a hole through the shell to escape when it is finished.
Once the good acorns have been selected it is time to bury them! I used seedling mix to start the acorns, and planted two acorns per container. If both acorns in a container happen to sprout we will eliminate one of them later when they pop above the surface of the dirt.
The scientist in me likes to experiment with different techniques, so half of the containers were covered in plastic wrap to try and retain moisture while the other half were left exposed to the air. I know, super scientific 😀
And that is the start of our tree growing experience! Besides keeping the soil moist there isn’t much to do at this point.
Take care and check back in a couple weeks to see if we have any sprouts!