http://www.edibleacres.org
https://www.youtube.com/channel/edibleacres/join – Join as an Edible Acres member for access to members live Question and Answer sessions and to support our work!
https://www.paypal.me/edibleacres – A simple and direct way to ‘tip’ to help support the time and energy we put into making our videos. Thanks so much!
Edible Acres is a full service permaculture nursery located in the Finger Lakes area of NY state. We grow all layers of perennial food forest systems and provide super hardy, edible, useful, medicinal, easy to propagate, perennial plants for sale locally or for shipping around the country…
http://www.edibleacres.org/purchase – Your order supports the research and learning we share here on youtube.
We also offer consultation and support in our region or remotely. http://www.edibleacres.org/services
Happy growing!
34 Comments
Thank You, always learning
I am doing the same experiment with two similar boxes but with a wide variety of seeds to see what works and what doesn't.
it's wonderful listening to you speak
Hi. Have you ever heard about hay bales spontaneously combusting? I just got a few to use as a wind barrier and then into the garden next year, however, the more I read about them, the less i want them right next to my house. What are your thoughts on this?
What about burying the entire air prune box in snow sort of like encasing it in its own igloo? Maybe remove the taller cap and use a flat cover for the winter so the snow is directly on top of the straw covering the compost.
Not quite on topic but I usually collect acorns in the fall as soon as they drop on the ground (to prevent grubs from eating them) and test them in a bucket of water. If they float, the grubs have already eaten the inner part of the acorn (no longer viable).
If they sink they are good for planting. They have to go through a wintering period. At this point I usually store them in a refrigerator in containers packed with moss and or damp sand/soil or damp paper towels). After about 4-6 months they will start to sprout. Just check them every so often. Once they start to sprout 🌱 I plant them in individual cans or large yogurt containers (all with drainage holes). They are covered with a hardware cloth box to keep the squirrels 🐿️ out. After a summer of growth I plant them in the fields or give them away. They grow quite successfully!
I just recently experienced the same with our Garry Oaks here on Vancouver Island, they like to send a taproot down during autumn. The acorns first start dropping from the tree roughly late September and this carries on up until late November. They are brittle the taproots, and one has to be extra careful about this during planting in air prune boxes, I find dibbing a hole with your middle or index finger helps to drop the taproot down into, and then back fill gently. One disadvantage to planting germinating acorns with an inch or so longer taproot is that you will have less space overall in the container, since you have to dib the hole and then accommodate the size of the acorn and its taproot. If you plan to grow acorns out in air prune boxes, and want to make use of every square inch of them, plant them early when they have yet to develop a taproot. I do often wonder that because oaks only develop a couple inches of top growth in their early years, and substantial deep root growth, should one plant them out a couple inches apart in an air prune bed, or would a spacing of 1 inch apart, and 1 inch off-center be detrimental? Should the air prune boxes be taller considering the growth differences of root compared to top growth?
I already planted the oaks I wanted to grow shortly after collecting them all the rest I'm going to turn into flour and see how that goes
So I’m in north central North Carolina but I fall or winter plant a lot of my tree seed in air prune beds. It seems to work very well here so long as seeds have some mulch over them. Historically this has been zone 7 but with the recent shift we are 8a now. I’ve only been doing this the past few years here. It’s been so dry this fall that I have been watering beds where I fall sowed paw paw seeds. I had a similar tangle of white oak seeds last fall. Got them all tucked in like you did and it worked out well except that I think I could have increased my spacing.
pokhui na tree seeds! chuksotu pokazivai blyat!
Very interesting.
very curious how this late fall planting works out for you.
It's always an adventure! 😅 Looking forward to seeing how they bounce back in the spring.
I planted tree seeds in Autumn into Air prune boxes on my first attempt 1 year ago. It was a great success.
I am on the East coast of the Scottish Highlands. I planted Acorns, cherry, Beech, Hazel, sycamore, Japanese Acer, Conkers (horse chestnut), Lime, and Hornbeam.
Lime and Hornbeam were the only ones that didn't germinate at all, the rest seemed like 100% successful germination.
The box was bare soil for most of winter, no mulch, and it froze solid multiple times. I assumed I had screwed up, but was delighted to get full boxes of trees.
It makes sense, because of course the seed freezes in the ground outside in nature.
This year I have gone from 2 boxes to about 12!!!
I put everything straight into air prune boxes, mainly because I never got round to organising a good mass stratification system like you have. Seems to work really well, only downside is that you need twice as many boxes as the previous years seedlings are never ready to lift when the new batch of seeds needs to go in!
I always gather nuts in the fall and throw them around. But I can't keep track and know whether or not they succeed. I figure I must have started at least a few dozen trees this way, because that woud be like a 1% success rate. I am loving this warm wave. Dug a nice deep tree well on a sandy slope garden yesterday to fill with compost to be a super productive place to try to grow cannabis next year.
I work for a legal cannabi grow so I have plenty of clones to play with and I want to know what the minimum effort for a good yield is. Pretty sure I will give the plant plenty of fertility, then it comes down to the level of canopy management I'm willing to do to prevent the tiny crappy nugs that form in areas of too-dense foliage. Thinking I'll just gently spread the branches out with hooked sticks stuck into the ground, I don't like increasing the chances of disease with pruning. I hurt plants all day in my gardening job, I don't like to cut plants if I don't have to. They can't run away. Gardening inevitably involves killing lots and lots of plants to get the plants you want, but I'm hopeful of being able to get a good yield by maniuplating the light without cutting because the branches are flexible.
I use the 4x4s from pallets under my air pruners. Sometimes down the long side to support the full length under the frame. sometimes just two parallel the short way at 1/3 intervals to support points.
I have over wintered, I believe it was black walnut, in a modified 2×4 frame with metal window screen top and bottom. I sank the frame into the ground and covered with leaf mulch. It was my first year and I had few seeds. And I don’t recall anything germinating early…
I would surround each of your boxes with bags of leaves to buffer the freeze/thaw cycles and wind. They would give the boxes some contact with the insurance inherent in the soil.
Sean, what is your air prune soil mixture you use? I believe you mentioned it in older air prune videos but I don’t recall.
I live in a hot and dry context here in North Texas during the summer so my beds have to be close to a water source or they go crispy and die relatively quick! Full sun is also a concern because of 100 degree days. A protection from the western scorching rays is what I’m considering more this year!
I haven’t planted airprune boxes in the fall before. I’ll be interested to see if you are successful in the spring!🌿
We are a little north of you and planted a few air prune boxes last year – several of them did very well but a few were not insulated as well and had anemic growth. Early successional plants that would begin transitioning a grassy area did better than later successional trees. This year we're planning heavier insulation to better moderate the low temps
I just did this as well for the first time so we shall see
I'm in southwest Michigan and have been planting my seeds in air prune beds in the fall to let them stratify over winter and start in the spring when they're ready to go. I've had very good success with chestnuts in that approach. Seaberry I've had very limited success. I can't say that it has been a highly successful approach across the board, because I've had plenty of failures with a range of other tree seeds – but I don't know that those failures would have gone better with a different approach as this is the only system I have used to date. Lavender was also very successful. We are in Zone 6
Red vs white oaks
It was a masting year, where trees collectively decided to produce an abundance of seeds. So I collected a basket of Burr Oak (white) and a basket Red Oak acorns. I placed them in our kitchen and was roundly scolded the nenxt morning when we found weevils inching across the kitchen floor. So, out to the porch went my two baskets.
Enter Squirrels.
I was away for the weekend. I came back to one empty basket and one untouched. The squirrels didn't leave a single white oak acorn but left the reds alone. Parallel to this the fact that white oak will germinate within a couple of weeks of falling, while reds must go through a winter to stratify. Parsnips, kale, Brussels sprouts and carrots become sweet in the cold as they produce a natural sugary antifreeze, transforming stored nutrients. Perhaps the fickle squirrel knows that the sugary energy needed for sprouting is sitting ready in the Burr Oak, while the reda must age to perfection over winter.
In my experience (and I think Akiva says something about this in one of his videos) all the white oaks (Burr, Gambel, English, Garry, Eastern white, etc) have a two-stage germination: the tap root emerges in the fall and grows through the winter. The growing shoot does not germinate/emerge until the spring. A seed collector friend has reported seeing tap roots emerging from acorns still hanging on eastern white oak trees. Given the proliferation of oaks, I would infer that the tap roots are sufficiently hardy to survive winter with the normal insulation of leaf duff and snow. This fall I have set out white oak acorns (and Aesculus species which have a similar germination pattern) in air prune boxes for the first time (arid zone 7b). We'll see how it goes. Anyone have thoughts on the value of insulating the sides of the boxes with straw bales relative the risk of encouraging vole habitat right next to the boxes? I have more rodents than a Paris sewer and putting up mousey-housing next to a mousey-food pantry seems a little a little dim. Thoughts?
I had to something very similar this fall. I'd collected a couple hundred Chinkapin seed and they began to sprout radicles pretty quick. I planted about 100 in-situ but the cold came quick and I had to resort to an AP box. We're running the same test with different oaks! Let's hope we both have good luck.
Mid Atlantic – so we don't get too cold but single digits happen. This year I put my chinquapins directly into the air prune beds. Last year I lost almost my entire crop. They all had super long roots when I took them out of the fridge in the spring and most didn't survive the transplant process. I mulched in the beds with bags and bags of leaves and left a small airgap under the bed. I'm doing my chestnuts with the bucket of sand buried in the dirt method. That seems to work well for me in my area. I don't bother to mulch over that. I do get some mold issues on chestnuts, especially in the fridge. Anyone have any suggestions for that? This year as a experiment I gave them a quick diluted beach bath, handled them with rubber gloves, them put them in the buckets.
You're probably fine in your climate. Last winter I planted thousands of acorns and hazel nuts in a set of air prune boxes designed just like yours and almost all of them winter killed, my theory is the soil temperature was too low during early winter when we had a cold snap without much snow. In ground soil is usually just below freezing and very insulated under some mulch and snow, but the cold can get under an air prune bed so I suspect the soil can actually freeze hard close to air temperature – maybe there's a way to solve this by banking some straw around them. This year my cache of acorns and black walnuts are in sealed tubs set in ground in the new root cellar to stratify, and I'll bring them out in april to plant into the air prune beds. Hopefully it works! Btw the Bur oak we have around here wants to sprout immediately without any cold stratification, if the acorns aren't surface air dried a bit they'll sprout within a week. I just let them dry for a week and then have them in ziplock bags in the fridge. Working great. I moved most of them to the root cellar, so the acorns are also just dry stored in there big ziplock bags to hold them back from sprouting. My walnuts and plum seeds are all packed in the usual damp peat/sand/compost to cold stratify.
Very curious to see how this goes! Earlier this year around the start of November I planted just a few extra hybrid hazels and chestnuts in an air prune bed as an experiment so I'll share my experiences with all of you as well. Great to hear all the comments from people in similar climates as me (Zone 6). Not only are your videos always engaging Sean but your community comment section is also a wealth of information!
I'm in the same situation with chestnut seeds this year. Strange that some began sprouting in the fall this year. I've never had that happen, they've always waited til spring in years past.
great timing Sean, I've just discovered the same thing nuts sprouting in the wild when I'm collecting leaves… walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, in two two climates, not just in a colder area.
I sprouted some cherry seeds and planted them in October and I just noticed that 2 have sprouted, do you think they will survive the winter I live in zone 8 at 4k elevation we have multiple snow storms and gets in the low 20's even in the high teens.
Have successfully done bur oak, shagbark hickory, hazelnut, butternut and japanese walnut all directy in airprune beds sitting on the ground in zone 5b near chicago. Gotta remember to prop em up on bricks sooner than later in spring or its no longer an air prune bed😂. Maybe could get away with having them up in the air all winter but insulate around them a bunch?
Instructions for building an air prune box, please!
is there an ideal window in the autumn/winter to push elder/willow/current cuttings into the earth?