Go to a
LOCAL state forest.....find the nut tree you want. Look and make sure no one is looking (it's illegal to remove the tree nuts from state
land), and then pick up a few nuts. Or along a road, etc.
Doing this locally, will help slow any disease/bugs moving around the country.
Another thing you can do, is go to the local soil and
water commission, and find when their annual tree sale is. (I've bought a thousand trees this way).
I plant 60-200 trees a year....(Mostly because I own 300 acres, and for several years before I bought the land valuable trees were all logged. Thus, there are broken oak trees of 3 feet in diameter, in the woods.......but....ZERO oak trees left in the woods, and the squirrels have left the area...lol.. It will take ? years to fix this problem. All the tiny oak trees that get going, get over browsed (the deer and
rabbits eat them), and even after nearly 10 years, the problem is slow to fix itself. Also true of pines, but these grow unexplainably fast on most of my land.
-- do a ph test on the soil...make sure it's in the range of the tree you'd like to plant.
Look at the trees growing in the area. Trying to plant a tree that does not belong, will often result in failure. Planting a tree near beavers is a waste of time, they will use the sapling in their dam.
We spend entirely too much effort trying to get a nut to germinate artifically, just go with a digging bar and plant 50 of the nuts. Do not plant them too deep, they need to freeze during the winter. Plant nut trees on a slope where they get plenty of water. If you see blueberries growing out of control in an area, then this area has a high PH, do not try to plant a tree that will not like that.