I picked acorns tonight from 1 tree in town. Right now I have a fan on them drying them. I plan to get more white oak growing on my hunting property & figure I will try this method. Most desirable to me is that white oak are less likely to be impacted by oak wilt.

Find a source for sawtooth oak acorns. They grow and mature faster than any other oak and wildlife love the acorns.

A friend gathers a few dozen acorns each year and plants then in black plastic landscape pots.,,after about a year he moves them to his hunting land

I plant to do the same this year.

I'm planning on doing the same with the sawtooth oaks we have. Someone planted 6 of them in a little honey hole I found a few years ago. Thinking of planting them in a few places around the farm.

In Mo, the state nusery in licking, mo will buy many different species, to be planted and sold as bare root seedlings.

You can can make flour with them. Boil the tannin out then grind. Acorn flour makes an interesting coffee.

a guy in the u p of michigan made a planter for acorns, i think it under 906 outdoors

After we pick acorns, we take the caps off of them and drop a bunch of them in a bucket of water. The ones that sink are the ones we use for planting. This also works for the hickory nuts too.

I don't think we can plant sawtooths in Wi.



https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/Invasives/fact/SawtoothOak.html

If anyone has a source on some sawtooth I'm interested!

Good luck . You'd be better off to walk around and put a ribbon on some saplings right now. Come back in march and transplant them where you need.. Should be able to find some anywhere . Don't need much to gain a few years on just sprouting an acorn. Your kids grandkids might reap the reward if your heirs don't sale before your grave has settled.


How Many Years Can it Take for an Oak Tree to Produce its First Acorn?



Oak trees (Quercus spp.) take decades to mature. Depending on their species, the trees are 20 to 30 years old when they produce their first acorns. Even then, acorn production is not consistent from year to year. Factors such as freezing temperatures during blooming, excessive rain, windy conditions, drought and nutrition can affect acorn production. Larger canopied trees receiving more light produce more acorns than smaller trees in shadier conditions. Most oaks are at their acorn production peak at 50 to 80 years of age. After the oak reaches 80, acorn production generally begins to decrease.

But like mentioned the sawtooth will produce in about 6-7 years.

Deer prefer to browse Red Oak Saplings and prefer to eat White Oak Acorns- they will however still browse - so you may want to tube some oaks if they come up. I would order Burr Oak transplants from the DNR- the root stock I got last year was awesome.

well i planted some burr oaks trees from Menard's in 2016 and this year i have acorn

dont dry them. float them. put them in water, the ones that float wont grow. the ones that sink cover with dirt in a baggie put in fridge till spring. in spring you will see them sending out roots, then plant

Interesting thread

I've never tried the (Spray and Pray) dump method for acorns but the guy that wrote my Forest Management Plan said it's a viable option, I'm sure the squirrels will help plant a lot them. He said nothing plants a tree like nature and told me to focus on the areas where I have current oaks- "they want to be here for a reason"

white oaks germinate in the fall, they do not need any stratification.
They will germinate when in contact with cool moist soil.
Throw them in water, let them sit for a day, after that day discard any that are floating.
Put them in pots or the ground. They will germinate right away. White Oak acorns are alive and growing all the time, roots first then stem/leaves. You won't see leaves, the root will come out and grow into the soil until the weather turns cold. Next spring is when the leaves show up.



I have grown Burr Oaks from acorns, I would say about 1/4-1/3 of the acorns gathered germinated, lots of weevils in the acorns in the bunch I got.

You will have to protect them from deer, in my experience deer eat every white oak seedling they find. Plant them where they get at least 1/2 day of sunlight.

white oaks are headed for a decline in numbers unless woodlots are thinned heavily to allow sunlight in to the forest floor. White Oaks can not survive in all day shade.

Fire is the white oaks friend, protect seedlings until they get a couple of inches in dia. then they will survive fire unlike most trees. They resprout vigorously after fire if they are too small to survive a fire.
If you read any historical accounts of the land when early settlers arrived they mention oak grubs, oak grubs are the resprounting oak trees that continually resprouted after annual fires.
Burr oak is the best tree for fire resistance.

I picked up a bunch of Sawtooths acorns several years back and did the float test and afterwards put them about an inch or so down in potting soil in individual pots. Apparently they are the easiest thing to grow in the world besides weeds. By Spring they were all up and leafing. I gave all those away to friends and to this day still have Sawtooths sprouting in the wife’s flower bed where I apparently dropped some acorns. It’s like you can’t get rid of them or kill them, lol.

I just picked a bunch of pin oak acorns up from one of my trees to grow. Its loaded this year!

if you can water the heck out of oaks for the first 5 years they will throw acorns in 7 to 9 years. I'm talking 15 gallons per tree per week, having a nice open overstory helps also

Very interesting.

Thanks everyone for the great feedback so far

It seems like the different species of Oaks get treated differently as far as when to plant and how. Such excellent advice on this thread.

I think I'm going to invest in an acorn planter. I had never heard of 1 until this thread.

I'd like to buy some burr oak from WDNR but I don't think I can order enough trees to meet their high minimum order requirements.

1 of the reasons I want a diverse array of oak types is to help mitigate the risk of disease wiping out my forest.