While walking in the woods this weekend I passed what I presume was an oak tree. At its base there were loads of acorns. Many of them had a little 1/4" shoot poking out one end (A boy!) that, presumably, would drill into the ground so the acorn could take root.
I pocketed one of the little guys with the intent of growing my very own oak tree. (Hey, I’ll never have kids, and an oak tree is immortal enough for me. And if I get bored with it, I’ll make a desk. You have to keep busy in your golden years.) How hard will this be (I mean growing an oak, not making a desk)? Is it as simple as plopping it on top of a pot of soil and supplying it with light and water? And how long will I be able to keep the sapling in a pot before it gets too big?
I don’t have any experience raising oak trees, but I’ve had a lot of fun painting acorns. With the holiday season coming up, you can paint them to look like little Santa Clauses, with the cap as his…cap. You can also paint them to look like dredyls. I’m sure there’s even a way to decorate them for Kwanzaa (I don’t know much about Kwanzaa, though). I think that if you’re celebrating the Solstice, you’ll probably want to plant it and do the tree thing.
I don’t know about growing it in a pot and then later transplanting it–this just talks about planting it in the ground. But it’s better than nothing, methinks.
Shouldn’t be that hard. I planted an avocado pit in a pot and now I have a tree about 18" high. I’m going to re-pot it into a bigger pot soon and keep it there until I think it’s big enough and then plant it in the yard. Big enough means my hubby won’t mow it down thinking it’s a week and my dog won’t lay on it and crush it!
Oh, and as far as the oak goes, I’d cover it with a thin layer of soil in the pot, keep the soil moist but not wet, and provide plenty of light. You’ll need to keep the sapling in a pot for a pretty long time, though, I believe. Oaks don’t grow as fast as some other kinds of tree, and there’s variation even between different varieties of oak.
Completely off topic, but in college they had tea bags with quotes on the tag. We would read them aloud and add “between the sheets” to the end of them (like fortune cookies). The best one was Have patience. With time the littlest acorn becomes a mighty oakbetween the sheets
Me and my brother grew an oak tree from an acorn when we were kids. Started out with the acorn and a small pot (actually, we might have put in three acorns and then culled any extra sproutlings). Kept it indoors the first year. Second year, larger pot. Let it live outside in the summer (left it alone, no watering or anything), brought it in for the winter. Third year, planted it in the backyard.
My very first teacher gave us each an acorn at the end of the school year. I was thrilled (hey, I was 5), and I took it home and planted it in a pot. Every few days I dug it up to see how it was going.
Eventually, with nothing ever changing, I started to forget about it. It had turned into a shrivelled, wrinkled thing by this time. Dad waited until I hadn’t dug it up for a couple of weeks and snuck in to take it and throw it away. To his surprise, it had sprouted! He quickly covered it up again and left it alone. After a week or so, the shoot had come through the soil. Dad called me out and showed me my acorn was growing. I was thrilled! I watered it and looked after it (for a while, then Mum took over) and eventually it grew into a little tree. Then Dad began to wonder what we were to do with it. I was attached to my little oak tree, but we didn’t have room to grow one in the yard! He discussed moving it to my uncle’s property in the bush, but I was upset at the idea of being parted from it. They just let it go and figured they’d see what happened.
One weekend, when the tree was about 5 years old, we went to an expo at the garden centre, and they had people doing bonzais there. Mum and Dad immediately thought of the oak, and asked if it could be bonzaied. The people said “Sure! Bring it in!”, so we dashed home and took it to them. At this time, it was bigger than your usual bonzai, but they told us bonzais could be six feet tall, it was all to do with stunting the tree from growing more, so it was an oversized bonzai - about 10 inches tall. I also remember that when they took it out of the pot I’d planted it in when I was 5, they discovered the bottom quarter of the pot was filled with large rocks! No wonder it was so heavy!
Using copper wire, we trained some of the branches to make it look nice, and we were shown how to trim it and keep it nice. It looked great when it was finished, and we took it home.
It survived years of neglect, the dog chewing one of the branches off and a house move. Finally, last year, the summer was just too hot for it and it died (to my distress). Still, it was 19 years old which isn’t too bad an effort I think!
