So it turns out we do have oak trees on the homestead that produce acorns!! I happened to be up on the homestead when one of the trees was starting to drop acorns, so I decided to grab some for growing at home.
While it is a little painful to give up on the acorns I had planted a few weeks ago, it makes much more sense to plant acorns from our property. We currently live fairly close to the homestead, but there is always a chance that it is different enough to make it tough on the tree to thrive. Outside of some black magic tomfoolery the oak trees on the homestead have already proven they are adapted to grow there. With that in mind, I decided to try to grow the trees from acorns that I had collected from the homestead. I would have to dig up the acorns I had planted before, but this would give me an opportunity to see it any of the acorns had started to sprout!
And that appears to be a big negative 🙁 It isn’t super surprising since it had only been a couple of weeks, and I read somewhere that it can take up to 60-90 days. And in my limited experience, trees seem pretty difficult to grow from seed compared to your normal garden vegetables. Granted it is a crazy small sample size, but data none the less 😀
While I was waiting for the original acorns to sprout, I did a little more research on growing acorns. As with most things there are a few differing opinions on how to go about this. One recommendation was to soak the acorns in water for a full day prior to planting. Originally I had only soaked them for a few minutes in order to see which seeds were still viable.
As you can see from the pictures the soaking also begins to remove the tannins from the acorns. That isn’t important for growing the acorns, but it is necessary if one wants to eat any of the acorns. I’ll go into more detail on this in a future post about processing the acorns.
The second additional technique was to try sprouting the seeds in a bag of soil in the refrigerator. Once (or I suppose if) they sprout then you can take the seeds out and plant them into a container.
As far as I know all that is needed is to make sure that the soil stays moist. Since it is a closed container and in the refrigerator it should take a while for it to dry out. We shall see since that’s what this is all about! 🙂
And that’s about all we can do at this point. Thanks for reading and check back in about month to see if we have any saplings!