Although it’s a heart-lifting story, it’s complete fiction from start to finish.
Obvious to anybody who ever tried Real life forestation, you don’t simply plant acorns into a barren area once the forest is gone: the wind and rain will take the soil away, there will be less water for the seedlings, the wind and snow will crush the seedlings … small trees all alone in an open field have no chance. You start from the edges of an existing forest that provides wind shield and water, and add another line each year. Or you start in the shadow of a fallen log or similar, in a small clearing. But not on a wide open space.
I’ve read that scientists testing the memory of squirrels find them to have a very large and reliable memory. They speculate that a large number of seeds buried by squirrels sprout because not all squirrels survive the winter. One squirrel that has a few hundred caches of seeds is killed by a hawk or fox, and bloom, seeds sprout.
The other factor is theft: scientists observing squirrels noticed that a squirrel that suspected somebody had watched it while hiding its stash would later go back, dig the cache up and bury it elsewhere … and this second hole might then be easier forgotten than the first careful choosen one.
I was thinking about this thread the other day. I gathered a bunch of white oak acorns last fall when my wife and I were at Biltmore. This weekend, I put them into little peat pots, just barely covered with potting soil.
I want the OP’s secret. We have a number of trees including several oaks. Every fall, I rake up the leaves and dump them in the garden. Every summer I fight to keep my garden from turning into Sherwood Forest. Too deep sounds promising to me. This year I piled all the leaves with acorns mixed into them in one spot. My theory is only the ones near the top will sprout, leaving me with many fewer oak seedlings to kill off.
Some acorn can be eaten like other kinds of nuts, and nearly all of them can be ground to produce oak flour. But it’s not used that much because there are other crops (wheat, oats, etc.) that produce much more grain, faster & cheaper. And the taste (either as nuts or flour) is not special enough to create any great demand. So it’s just not economically viable as a crop.
