I live in South-Central Mississippi and have been lurking here for quite some time. I have enjoyed reading everyone's posts and have learned much thus far. Recently though, I had an
experience that has
led to a possible time-critical need for an
answer to a question that I have not yet seen addressed here.
This past spring, I located what ultimately turned out to be an Allegheny chinquapin. I marked its position and checked on it frequently to monitor its progress hoping to gather some seed to plant on my family's farm. On September 30th, I gathered 29 nuts and brought them home with the intent of cold stratifying them, per instructions I had read previously from some internet source. Believing that I would return to the tree to gather additional seed as more of the burs opened, I placed those already collected in a zip-loc bag and set them on my kitchen table. I noticed a bit of moisture had condensed on the sides of the bag but since I was under the impression that they had to be cold stratified prior to germination, I let them be.
Today (October 6th), I returned to the tree, collected more seed, came home and presented them to my father to see if he could correctly identify them (he did). I then picked up the plastic baggy containing the ones I had collected last week and to my eternal surprise, 8 of the 29 seeds I originally collected had germinated.
I quickly gathered some ~ 1/2 gallon pots (the only thing I had to hand), filled them with well hydrated Mel's Mix (the only thing I had to hand) left over from a previous square foot garden and placed each germinated nut therein,
root down. I then sprinkled a bit of dry Mel's mix over the surface and set the pots outside.
I was under the impression that cold stratification was necessary to get the seeds to germinate. Given that is obviously not the case, I'm now wondering if perhaps cold stratification is necessary merely to prevent germination until more favorable conditions arrive (spring). And if that is the case, will I need to baby these babies through the winter or will they merely go dormant and bud out next year at the appropriate time and grow well?
And if fall germination is part of the normal life cycle of the Allegheny chinquapin this far south, and since direct seeding usually yields superior results,
should I rush out and direct seed any others that germinate in the bag?
Lastly, do these nuts merely send down a tap root in the the fall/winter with the emergence foliage deferred until warm weather returns?
What would y'all do given a similar set of circumstances?
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