How to Grow Pecan Trees From Seed!

howdy everyone and welcome back to the more you grow so i've been doing a little bit of a video that's taken over a year to make just because i want to show you all the processes and steps into going to this but one of the things i want to do out here at the farm is i want to plant some trees and i want to plant pecan trees specifically so i could buy already grafted pecan trees but they're going to be about 40 50 bucks apiece and i want a lot of trees the best way to go about that if you want a lot of trees is just to grow them yourself there's going to be some steps you have to do along the way but you can do it for a fraction of the cost so i'm going to show you today how you can start your own pecan trees from seed how to choose which pecans you want to use to start your new trees how to get them started all the steps along the way so let me take you along back here and let's go check it out so the first step in starting your new pecan trees is to find a seed source for those pecan trees that's pretty easy to do for the most part but there's a few decisions you have to make before you start your new pecan trees you have to decide what your seed source is going to be so there's two different categories of pecans there are native pecans which are just the wild ones that grow out in nature and then there's the paper shell which are selected varieties that were selected for bigger pecans and for thinner shells so what most people see in the stores and what you've ever bought are usually paper shells so they're thinner shelled larger nut then you have something like this for your native pecans so much much smaller and a harder shell the flavor is exquisite but it's just hard to get them to crack and it's a lot of work to do that so i'll put these side by side for a minute so you can see the comparison so this is a much much more favorable nut for eating but i like to use the native pecans for my seed source in starting new trees the reason why is because these are a little bit more genetically hardy they have a lot more biodiversity they have a stronger root stock so they will be able to grow a more vigorous root system and it tends to be a little bit more disease resistant than the paper shell varieties so i'm going to get the best of both worlds here because i don't want to crack open a bunch of native pecans and have to deal with that plus if you start the proceed it'll be about 20 years before they ever start to produce nuts so let's get the best of both worlds what i'm going to do is start root stock trees for the native pecans which will have a strong root stock and later when they get a little bit older i'm going to graft on paper shell variety nuts onto the tree so we're going to take branches from paper shell varieties and graft them on to the native root stock so we get the disease resistance and we also get the more favorable crop so i will do that in a different video but for today i'm just going to show you how to start the trees from seed so let's gather up some of these pecans and then we're going to take them out to get them planted so once you find a source of pecans for planting into your new trees the next step is going to be a little bit different than you would have to do for a lot of other seeds pecans have to have a step called stratification which just means a period of dormancy in this case cold temperature dormancy so because they will drop their the seeds in the fall around the end of fall and they will stay there on the ground and kind of around that area maybe carried off somewhere else but they will stay dormant until spring they have to have cold temperatures in order to germinate so you might be thinking the easiest way is just to leave them out there why not just leave them out there we can just dig them up when we're ready to move them well here's some of the issues with that one you're going to lose a lot of your seeds to predators things like squirrels rats crows weevils which are the little insects like to lay their eggs on them and the grubs will drill a hole into them that's why you'll see some pecans that's why i made sure to say don't pick up pecans with holes in them to use for germinating your seeds they have a weevil in them and they're not going to germinate all that well you don't want to keep those and another problem you'll have is the winter temperatures can be very unreliable you might end up having a really warm winter and not have that much germination success or a really really cold winter that kills off a lot of your seedlings so we need something a little bit more consistent you also have the risk of damaging your seedlings by trying to dig them up once they're germinated if you try to dig up a seedling in the ground most people don't realize how deep that taproot is on a tree that's no more than a few inches the tapper could be four times that length that if you cut through the taproot you're not going to have a successful seedling so there's a lot easier way to get your pecans stratified rather than leaving them outside just use your refrigerator we can trick them into thinking it's winter time by using the refrigerator and stratifying our seeds that way so i keep the refrigerator around the optimal stratifying temperature around 33 to 45 degrees or about 33 to 42 degrees i like to keep the refrigerator back here in the school lab where we keep our seedlings around 40 degrees fahrenheit and that seems to be a really good temperature for keeping the seeds cool in so the first step to stratifying your seeds is you want to make sure that they are nice and dry you don't want any kind of outside moisture to them or anything like that if they've been rained on you want to make sure they're really dry before putting them into the refrigerator or the mildew so you want to avoid that once they're nice and dry just put them in some kind of resealable baggie and i like to press out the air i've seen some people put them into some kind of moist potting mix and put them in the refrigerator the only reason i don't like to do that is because they start to germinate in the baggie and i'd rather germinate them when i want them to germinate so i put them into a baggie i press out all the air make sure i mark the date on the baggie just because i have multiple years of multiple generations of pecans going on and if you got multiple locations of different varieties you want to make sure you put the location that you picked it up in the date and the variety if you want to do that so i press out all the air and then i just put these down into the crisper door of the refrigerator you can do that at home with yours most refrigerators are at that within the optimal range of temperatures so all i do then is i leave them in there for about 30 to 90 days to germinate you could leave them in there longer but i usually say around that range and they will start to germinate a lot more successfully you'll see a lot more vigor to your germination so they'll sprout very quickly with a lot of strength so i'm going to go ahead and put these in the refrigerator and then i will show you what happens after a few months of time in the refrigerator and we'll get them germinated so after about 30 to 90 days of stratification in the refrigerator our pecans are ready to germinate so that just means to get them planted i normally like to plant mine a few weeks before the last frost just because we have the greenhouse here but if you do not have a greenhouse at home that's no big deal i would just recommend planting them sometime around your average last frost date in the spring so that way you can get them nice and germinated you'll have the warmth to get them going and it's usually just a little bit easier to do so i'm going to share with you how i plant pecan seedlings but there's probably lots of different methods out here that's just the way that i've done it in the past and it's always worked for me so i'll share that with you now so what i do is i like to get some kind of tall container this is just a three gallon pot three and a half gallon pot from a previous plant that i got at a nursery just something left over i like to have a tall pot because it gives it more depth for the tap roots on the pond seedlings they grow very deep they grow very fast so we have to have something with some depth to it so this just seems to be the easiest thing to find probably the easiest thing for you to find as well there are other containers you'll probably see me use in this video but here's one that you can use at home so what you want to do is you want to put some general purpose potting mix in here nothing fancy about that and you want to get it nice and moist before you get started so that way you don't have to disturb your seeds once you get them all planted in there so what i do is i take my pecans and i place them on their side a few inches down about halfway exposed so you can plant them deeper the whole reason i do this is just something i've observed around my house seems like all the pecans i find sprouting just in the wild around my house without me doing anything they're about half buried in the soil and they're sprouting like crazy all over the place so i kind of just tend to mimic what i see works so you could plant these all the way i would say you can plant them a few inches but this is just what i've always done i don't know why it's what i do so i just made rows of multiple pecans in a pot the reason why i do this is because one it saves on space i can get multiple pecan seedlings in this pot and i don't have to take up a whole table to do that it saves on resources i don't have to use a ton of potting mix for just getting them germinated i can always what i'm going to do later is we're going to take these once they germinate they they're going to get about a few leaves on them and then we're going to remove those and give them their own pots then but until we see how many of them germinate it's easiest just put them all in one pot and then move them later so save some resources and it also saves on the amount of effort you have to do if you have to move the potter up in this case you only have to move one pot rather than like 12 to 20 pots so what i do is i make a ring i space them about three or four inches apart so i just make a little ring like so and i'll put multiple rings in this i go around the outside edge first so we got some around the outside edge there and then i move over a little bit and i kind of stagger these a little bit where they're not just all lined up so kind of staggered a bit and then we got about a dozen in this pot let me show you what we got here so i just layer them about like that i'm going to push them a little bit deeper than this but i want you to still be able to see now just lay them like this they will germinate in a few well hopefully a few days to a few weeks and then once they get tall enough i'd say where they have about two three leaves maybe a few more on each plant i like to then separate all these i just take them out of the pot i usually just turn the whole pot over onto something like a tart and then i will separate all the little individual seedlings into their own pots which i'll show you how i do next so after a few months you're going to end up with a big tub of con seedlings and in my case one tomato seedling that's happened to fall in there so when we have this what we need to start doing is we need to move them out into their own separate containers i would have normally done that before now but cool all that stuff kind of kicked in and that's still fun they're just easier to get out when they're a little bit smaller than this what i have to put them into these are called tree pots and so these are four inch by nine inch deep and this is going to give the roots space to grow nice and long so it's not really about how much space you give width-wise you really want to give trees more depth so instead of wasting a bunch of soil getting pots that are nine inches deep and super big around you can get multiple seedlings in one place by using something like this now you can you can use other pots to plant your tree seedlings in and they'll work just fine this is just a plain one gallon container that i put this little pecan seedling into earlier this year you can see it's doing just fine so there are options to this guys you don't have to do exactly everything i'm doing and i know a lot of you are thinking wow this would be really easy if i had a greenhouse to do all this in you don't have to do this in a greenhouse you can put these guys out on your front porch out kind of in out kind of in a yard you can really put them anywhere they're going to grow fine as long as you keep them nice and watered and keep the soil moist and with these guys you can pot them up and put them out outside as well and get them used to being outside earlier there's no big deal with that i'm just using the greenhouse because it's got space available in it right now and it's where i can kind of keep an eye on things a little bit better but you don't have to have a greenhouse so all i'm going to do now is i'm going to show you i'm going to bring you close up and show you how i take the seedlings from our germination container into their new pots so let me bring you a little closer and show you how i do that so what we're going to do here is we're just going to go in here and try to scoop under these little seedlings so that way we get the whole roof and that's the point in growing them this way rather than planting them out in the ground and trying to dig them up a lot of times you'll end up cutting the root in half if you try to do that if you ever cut the taproot on a pecan they just don't do as well if not die out right so this is where this method comes in handy i'm hoping i didn't leave these little guys in here too long i would normally got them out sooner but we're going to give it a try so all i'm going to do is go down in here and get under one of these little trees try to make sure i just loosen that root out to where i don't break it and voila we have a perfect little seedling that we can put in our new tree pots so all we do from there is we'll try to keep some of the soil intact so that way it has some soil to transfer with and all i'm going to do is i fill these up with just some general purpose potting mix i added a little bit of fertilizer to it just because these guys need a boost once they go in and we'll just pot it up as is and we'll have its own little pot so i'm gonna take you over to the potting mix and we're gonna pop some of these up [Music] [Music] so we have all our trees planted up or at least all of them that will fit in this container and so all we're going to do now is we're going to water these in what i like to do and this may not be something everyone has available is i like to use a little bit of water from our aquaponics tank or our koi pond and here in the greenhouse what that does is it adds a little bit of boost of nutrients some nitrogen the nitrates in the water and it really boosts the microbial activity in the soil it kind of inoculates the soil and really helps these trees out it seems and so if you don't have a koi pond at home but if you got a fish tank one thing i love to do when you do your regular water changes use that water to water your plants that is a huge boost of microbial activity for your plant soil it's going to add some nitrogen into that into that soil for the plants to use and they just love it i used to have a fish tank did that all the time and they loved it so it's something you can do every so often when you do a water change so i'm going to do that if you don't have something like this you can add some rain water to water this in that's what i would go for if you don't have that tap water is fine it's not going to hurt these trees too much i just like to go for more more beneficial water when i can go for it so rain water or using water from your fish tanks your aquaponics tanks koi ponds anything like that that will all work just fine so we're gonna water these in really well with some of our good fish water and if you don't already have fertilizer in your soil you could do some liquid fertilizer to water these in but if you have fertilizer in your soil or your potting soil comes with fertilizer i wouldn't double down i would just go with whatever it has in it and use plain water or if it doesn't have any fertilizer in it then you can add some fertilizer in in your water but be sure to check if you get things like miracle grow it's going to have fertilizer already in it so just be aware of that and be aware of what you're adding to your soil when you can just because sometimes you can overdo it so too much is not always a not always a good thing so all we're going to do now that we've got these potted up and we've got them watered in we're just going to keep them nice and moist throughout the summer and then towards fall i'm going to move these guys outside into the outdoor into the outdoor area to harden off and what that means is i'm just going to get them where they're used to the wind they're used to the sun and we're going to gradually introduce them to being outside and come fall we're going to pot these or we're going to plant these into the ground out of the farm and try to get them established what they're going to do is they're going to start putting their roots out they're going to start growing the roots throughout the winter where they don't have to worry about growing leaves and roots and they're not dividing their efforts so they'll grow roots throughout the winter in the spring and then spring they will be able to leak back out but you definitely want to give these guys the ability to go dormant in the wintertime so that they're nice and healthy so i'll keep you updated on our pecan trees how they're doing and if you want me to talk about other kinds of trees how you can start those from seeds like oak trees or maple trees things like that we can talk about how to grow those trees from seed as well so until then if you like this video be sure to hit that like button if you have any more questions for me about how to start trees from seed or how to start pecan trees from seed or if you have any suggestions for other kinds of trees you'd like to see me grow be sure to leave them down in the comments and i'll be sure to get on that if you haven't done so yet be sure to subscribe to the channel go check us out on facebook and instagram and hit that bell icon for notifications until next time i hope you'll join me right here on the more you grow [Music] you

Channel: The More You Grow

Views: 47,393

Keywords: how to, how to grow, growing, farming, gardening, the more you grow, homesteading, pecans, pecan trees, growing pecan trees, how to grow pecan trees, how to grow pecan trees from seed, nut trees, how to grow nut trees, growing trees

Id: _lrqWLd805M

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021