About a year and half ago I gathered a few acorns from beheath some of the neighborhood oak trees and planted them about 4 or five inches into the soil in my yard.
Nothing happened.
What do I have to do to successfully grow an oak from an acorn?
Had a half a billion fall from my tree onto my lawn last year, and LOTS of them germinated. So it’s not hard at all. Just drop them on the soil and water very occasionally.
You planted too deep. I used to plant them at my grandpa’s farm and they grew into nice trees. Dig a small hole an inch deep and drop in an acorn. Fill in the hole and leave them to grow. Plant extras. You can always thin.
Way too deep…
The easiest way is to take a small garden spade out and transplant a few that sprouted on their own.
Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood of the Royal Navy used to always carry acorns around in his pocket and would plant them whenever he was out in the country. He wanted to make sure that there would be plenty of oak trees for Britain’s future ship-building needs.
Ironically, oak trees take over a hundred years to grow large enough to be cut down for lumber. And in the century after Collingwood planted his acorns, navies switched over to steel for ships.
Since the OP has been answered…
The Man Who Planted Trees (text)
THe Man Who Planted Trees (video, 30:00 – audio is a bit low)
The Man Who Planted Trees (video, 30:00 – chinese subtitles and French titles, but better (English) audio)
I grew an oak sapling from an acorn when I was a child - my first grade teacher gave me the acorn, so I must have been five or six. I just… stuck it in a pot of earth and watered it when I remembered (which was a lot at first, and then less as time went on). At some point my mother took over caring for it, and eventually she took it to the local garden centre and had it trimmed and wired up to be a bonsai. It lived about 20 years, dying one excessively hot summer.
oooh! A bonsai oak tree. That sounds pretty cool. Maybe I can do that here. I have a ton of germinated acorns. They show up everywhere.
Acorns have to be buried by squirrels to grow. The squirrel salvia (try saying that fast) has enzyimes that activate the growth genes.
wouldn’t the squirrels go hungry what with all their acorns germinating?
Judging from the number of pecan saplings we see popping up in weird places, squirrels at least sometimes forget where they left their stash.
We don’t have squirrels here, but our oaks seem to propagate just fine.
I thought squirrels nibbled out a section of acorns they were going to stash, which prevented germination? Sure I saw something like that on an Attenborough show.
This is not true, I believe it’s an attempt at a joke.
Although it is true that oak trees do rely upon squirrels and other critters to spread their acorns.
I just called the garden centre and they’ve never heard of it.
Hmmmm. Squirels use salvia?
I don’t even know where to begin saying what’s wrong with that sentence.
But it would be rude if I just left it at that;
[ol]
[li]They don’t. They germinate no matter what buries them. Or even if they just fall from the tree for that matter.[/li][li]“Squirrel salvia”? Is that some sort of plant? OK, I’ll admit that’s just me being nitpicky.[/li][li]“Enzyimes” can’t “activate genes”, genes are active or they aren’t. They can break apart the proteins that make DNA up. Hormones and neurotransmitters could cause a change in physiology already predetermined by a given organism’s physiology, but I find it unlikely that squirrels would produce a (complicated and energy wasting) substance that ruined their stashes of food.[/li][/ol]
I have some huge oak trees that produce a lot of acorns. Almost every single one I pick up is an “empty”, no fruit inside. The squirrels can tell which are good and which are bad and ignore the bad ones. The good ones are sometimes pulled off even before they hit the ground.
Maybe the OP’s acorns were ones passed over by squirrels for good reason.
Don’t touch that squirrel’s nuts!
The figure I’ve heard is that squirrels fail to recover about 80% of what they bury.
What I do know from experience is that I wind up with a lot of tulips in my lawn.