Acorns Part 3

Maybe you have been following our acorn adventure, and if not, you can catch up by reading Part 1 here and Part 2 here.  I wasn’t sure we’d have a part 3 to write about, but I’m pleased to tell you…we do.

David has not been incredibly consistent in watering the acorns this winter.  Part of it was that it was decided to move the trays of planted acorns down to the “old basement” of the house.  Knut was concerned our house would be too dry, and the very idea of not using our front entryway all winter was just too much.  He thought the little cups would be more moist in the unfinished part of our basement.  That part of the house is more of a diversion and pump area for the basement flooding that happens every spring, as well as the place Knut has his wax bench set up for waxing the family’s skis.

So we set the trays down there, but unfortunately, “Out of sight, Out of mind” and it they didn’t get watered every week like we had planned.  Though honestly we didn’t know if they needed to be watered every week, every day, or every month.  We simply couldn’t find any information on how much attention they needed, though we got the feeling it wasn’t much.  Oak tree seedlings in the “wild” lay nearly dormant all winter without being watered, and the sources we read seemed to say we should try to emulate that.

So either David remembered, or we remembered to remind David to water them about once or twice a month all winter.  I think there was a good 6 weeks that they got no attention at all because we just forgot.

So I was really worried that we would have to throw them all out, and I had actually begun to wonder if we should sneak them out of the house, or if we’d have to break it straight to David that the acorn project had failed.  We were going to wait the full length of the process, and throw them out maybe around early June.

I still reminded David when I could.  I still let him water them when he remembered.  Yesterday was a day that I remembered them, and I sent him down there to water his trees, and he came up yelling and excited that they had started to sprout.

They have started to sprout!

I ran down to the basement with him, and saw that over all the trays that we had down there, (hundreds of trees) there was somewhere around 5-10 that had shoots coming up out of the cup.  I’m sure there are more coming.  It’s a dark room down there, so we brought up a few to take some pictures.

We’ve decided to move the trays back up to the front entryway in the next day or two to get these little guys back in the light.  We need to do some research and see if we need to transfer them into bigger cups.  The taproot of these little guys are on my mind, as they aren’t supposed to spiral on the bottom.  These little stems feel strong and woody.  When I was describing them to Knut he laughed and said, “They’re oak trees, Gretchen, not marigolds.”  I’ve just never been apart of a baby tree project before, and I didn’t know how they would feel.  These little guys are stiff and strong.

Regardless of any of that, David is really excited he will have a project to take to the county fair as his big 4H project.  He’s excited at the very least we’ll have trees to plant in our yard, and very likely, he’ll have some trees to sell at the local farmer’s market this summer.  He may be able to buy the pigs he wants to raise after all.  I guess Knut needs to look into fencing in the woods behind our house for David’s pigs this summer sometime, because it looks like David may get the money for them after all.

I’ll admit, seeing these little guys, Knut and I gave out a big sigh of relief.  We made it to Part 3.

Now I’m fairly certain, we’ll get to a Part 4 later on this year.