Planting Oak tree acorns- Beginning to end

all right hello everyone uh thanks for joining today uh so today i'm gonna cover just the process that we go through on on getting these oaks basically from acorns all the way to these small oak trees i'm going to break this video into basically four parts uh the gathering of the acorns the testing uh kind of what you want to look for how to test acorns than the stratification process and i'll talk a little bit the difference between like say a white oak and a red oak and why it's important to know which kind of acorns you're gathering then the germination process and the planting in different containers in the spring or even the fall depending on what type acorn you have the i will cover just a little bit on on supplies i'll cover that i guess first you'll of course going to need to get acorns which we'll cover a little bit more you'll need a bucket or some type of container with water in it so you could test the acorns you'll need some type of small container well and i and i say small but this will be for the the stratification process you could use ziploc bags depending on how many acorns you're going to have for example in this bucket there's probably at least 100 acorns in there so you're going to need a bigger container than this you'll need peat moss or sand to go inside of this but then this will go inside of your refrigerator so it'll need to be a container inside that and then once the germination starts uh and you'll plant the acorns you'll need some type of container to plant those in and that's what i'll i'll show and then you'll need your your potting mix or potting soil to actually put put in here and then put your acorns in which will also show kind of what what we've been using now i'll move the camera forward and and we'll get some close-ups of of the process all right the first part of the video we're going to cover the selection of acorns and testing of those acorns once you pick them up so i'm going to try to zoom in on this see if it'll focus so this here is a you know uh looks like a very solid acorn it's not busted it's not smashed not a lot of mold or anything on it pretty clean and no holes in it so you're going to try to pick as many of these up they will these are actual bur oaks which are white oak they will have a cap on top most of the time or probably 50 50 60 of the time you will need to take that off we just use a pair of pliers to gently remove it be careful you can't smash the acorns because they are generally soft once you pick up your acorns you're going to want to do a float test and what you do is just put your acorns in a bucket of water as you can see we probably have a couple hundred acorns in there if they float they are considered bad and many of them are you could they're they're lighter uh and normally that's because uh see if we could find one with the hole in it and then doesn't have holes many times they'll have an an oak weevil or an acorn weevil depending on who you're talking with and they actually drill holes or plant their eggs in them and then the larva actually grows inside and eats the inside of the acorn when you find those you also want to toss those sometimes they do sink and sometimes they will let's see if this could focus in on this you can see that hole hopefully so those a lot of times will be bad too they will sink after a while here's a good shot of another hole uh they will sink because they will fill up with with water uh but a lot of times these will not will not uh end up germinating i would i float these a couple different times the first time you float them maybe some are good some are bad the second time you know some more weevils are eating inside and you actually do not realize that but you just do it a couple times if you do it once that's also fine like i said just toss all these out those are all bad and you can definitely tell they're a little lighter than than than these that are sinking um that is pretty much testing like i said get rid of all these and then take the rest of them now if you allow the acorn to dry out it will start to float and you will the acorn will die so you don't want the acorns to dry out while you're while you pick them up and i'll show these are already germinating and i'll talk about why that is what type acorns but the next the next process is stratification and i'll show you what you need for that all right in this part we'll talk about the stratification process why it's important uh certain acorns need it certain nuts need it and others do not most time your red oaks are going to need to be strata go through the stratification process many white oaks do not and they'll germinate early in the fall you can see many acorns in here are actually germinated already and we'll cover that a little bit but basically stratification process is just putting the acorns or chestnuts or walnuts into a refrigerator over the basically over the winter and this is not the freezer just the refrigerator keeping them moist and that will basically tell the nut that hey winter is going on and then in the spring they'll be ready to germinate they will not many nuts will not germinate if they do not go through this process so it's very important um the tool the items you're going to need of course are the acorns we just float tested so you want the ones that sank then you're gonna take those and you're gonna put a layer just like you could use just like this a layer of peat moss um or sand some type of you do not want to use soil um nothing with fertilizer in it you basically just want something to keep keep them damp you could use i've even used paper towels sometimes when i didn't have peat moss available uh ziploc you could put them in a ziploc bag you could use these small containers like this i've used actually some pretty large containers that will take up basically entire shelf in the refrigerator the main thing you want to do here is just keep them moist you do not want them to mold so if you see some starting to mold you're going to want to take those out because you don't want that mold spreading to the other the other acorns you'll do this like said on red oaks uh normally they'll need you know 30 to 90 days so a lot of times what we'll do is if we pick up the red oaks um in in you could tell what the red oaks the difference between red oak and white oaks just by the leaves so when you're picking these acorns up uh look you may take a look at the trees and just see what the the leaves look like so you really you know what type your your you have and so you can know what process to use all right so luckily as i said before these acorns you could actually see what i was talking about that is a uh weevil um it's a what like said what they call an acorn weevil or a oak weevil and it actually you could see a hole that came out of this one in that i'll make sure and uh kill that so it doesn't actually grow to a new weevil or a actual um full-size insect and lay more but that's why some some of the ones with holes will actually go ahead and i'll show you they could still germinate even with weevil damage so it's so it's interesting i think you'll you'll see um some will some will not it just depends on how much damage they have so when you take these other refrigerator uh we're kind of fast forwarding here because again these are white oaks uh these are actually bur oaks and bur oaks germinate uh so basically they can start germinating as soon as they fall off a tree in in the fall and so you could see these already have but if these were red oaks we'd basically just leave them in the refrigerator all winter like said refrigerator not freezer keep them damp and then spring you just put these in a warm area and they'll start the germination process you'll know because you'll start seeing this this tap root come out you'd see one right here i'll try to pick this one you can see how long that top root is already so this is only this is probably a couple days old from when it started from about this size so you want to once they start germinating you want to check on these frequently or you want to plant them all immediately the reason why is these tap roots are pretty fragile and you do not want to you do not want to break them when you plant them so that's basically the germination when springtime comes with with red oaks they'll start germinating uh these white oaks that they they germinate in fall and so you want to go ahead and get them planted in fall because the roots will grow in your containers during uh during fall and now we'll move on to actually how we plant and what the containers we use okay so now we that we have our seeds either in the spring or in the fall depending on what type of seeds they are they will start germinating once they start germinating you're going to want to plant them pretty quick as i said before this is kind of the perfect germination stage in my mind the top root starts coming out and so you just want to start planting it at that time you could direct plant these that is a great way to grow the oaks the reason why is because the top root could they do grow extremely deep and so if you already know where you're going to plant it you're just planting a few of these just go plant the acorns directly if there's still a chance for a lot of freezing that kind of stuff maybe you want to start them in a container the containers we use most time are these they're six inch diameter and 12 inches long with holes in the bottom now the minimum you're going to want that your container to be is eight inches deep and the reason why is because these tap roots grow extremely long the first year in year two even with these 12-inch containers the taproot will grow out of the bottom of them if you're not checking them frequently and that's not good because again you'll have to end up cutting the tap root off and that's not the best for the tree so we prefer these the other nice thing about the six inch diameter for about a year to two years that actually keeps the roots it's about the right diameter to keep the roots growing down and not actually they don't grow to the side a whole lot um these containers also have little ribs square containers are probably significantly better because the roots do not wrap but these have little ribs on them to to try to keep um the roots from from not circling too much and wrapping around because you really want those roots to continue growing growing down once you have next once you have your containers you'll fill them with your your potting mix uh we make our own uh you could buy potting mix depending on how much you're getting potting soil potting mix the mixture it does not need to be exact mine's different every single time i make it this here is probably 40 percent peat moss some topsoil some you know probably 20 percent topsoil some perlite in there and sand i i did not have enough sand if i did i probably would have mixed something like a third sand a third uh peat moss and a third of compost or something like that or top soil again the compost is really adds a lot of value in terms of nutrients the the of course peat moss and sand have no nutrient value but the peat moss holds moisture and the sand allows the water to actually drain if you have ones that the water just stands it takes a long time to actually get down into the the bottom and that's really not good for for the growing process so what you're going to want to do this i just filled this one up and you're going to want to you know keep it probably a couple inches from the from the top pack it down where it's pretty tight if you're planning again this where they just start growing out i wish i would focus for you guys well it doesn't appear so you can see that small tap root that's you're just going to want to plant that and plant it that's facing down and then you'll just fill it with soil on top you can see the container behind that's that's basically it's once planted in there and that's kind of where the soil ends up being the reason we leave it down probably about an inch is just so when i am watering these i could easily put a you know an inch of water on top and it could be draining while i move on i hand water most of these right now if as i said if you have one that already has a long tap root like this growing out you're going to want to make sure not break that off and so when you plant it you're going to want to poke a you know a decent sized hole down into your your mixture and just put it down there and gently pack this back around it and i'll just leave this one in here because again i don't want to break that off but that will continue growing and it'll make a nice tree and it'll start growing like i said during the fall these these white oaks grow pretty good tap roots already and then in the spring those they'll start growing a stem coming up their trunk coming up and then start putting leaves on just to kind of show you what one looks like from a year ago i actually planted these in the spring i kept my white oaks in with my red oaks and walnuts so they did not germinate in the fall they all germinated in the spring and this container out of the way and that's kind of that's what one looks like it's probably about you know 12 to 14 inches tall it's growing very well it's probably about to go dormant with we're gonna have our first freeze tonight so to go dormant but they grow quite a bit the first year like i said that's just from the spring i expect these that we're planning now to grow a lot better roots during the fall and then i bet they they grow significantly faster next spring if you have any comments or suggestions feel free to leave them below i will be i have some chestnuts on the way so i'm going to be stratifying some chestnuts the exact same process i've done walnuts this way pecans everything else and so it's it does work um and i'll try to make some videos this spring when you start seeing these come up and let you guys know how they're going uh and also show the chestnuts as well

Channel: Mark S

Views: 6,626

Rating: 4.9130435 out of 5

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Id: 9l9xjixVcAg

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020