Awesome thanks! I really like the oaks in east Texas. Gonna try to create me a little piece of heaven. I have atleast 5 different kinds of acorns now. I don’t guess I really care what they are, but 2 are from trees that stayed green in the winter so I’ll keep them separate and when I transplant try to scatter them around.
I may start 20 or so in pots and then just throw the rest of them out in the field and disk em in. I’m tempted to take a rake and go harvest some. I can drive 45 minutes east and pick em up all over.
I also have a friend that’s offered me some dead oaks to cut up, now I’m wondering if he may have some small ones in his pasture I can transplant.
I have so many acorns on the ground it's like walking on marbles. After a good rain is a good time to collect them because they tend to wash up and collect in bunches. I could get acorns by the 55 gallon barrel full just from the ones laying in my yard. If you use a tractor to rake them up your gonna ruin a lot of the by cracking the shell. Live oaks are evergreen and will hold there leaves all winter and drop them in the spring. They put on new leaves as they drop the old ones.
I like live oaks for that reason but there is a tried off in areas where you get ice storms because the ice will weigh the tree limbs down and break them off causing a lot of damage. But on the plus side they are evergreen and they don't drop dead limbs as much as water/white oaks do.
If you have access to all the acorns you can get then that sounds like a good way to do it. I have thousands of little trees sprouting out all over the yard and if I want a new tree I just mow around it and let it grow. The best ones are the ones that come up on there own. They seem to be the strongest and grow the best if they came up on there own. Natural volunteers save you the recovery time that transplanting takes to get them started and they are the most drought resistant vs. transplanting them.
I planted a field of new container trees and a rabbit came along and snipped the tops off and I thought I would have to go back and replace them but they soon put out new leaves and made some of the best trees out of all I planted. Don't be afraid to prune early and train them to be a single trunk or multi trunk depending on what you would like the tree to become.
We had a guy that we bought trees from and he would use old news paper or cardboard around the base to keep the grass back from the trunk so he didn't have to weed around the tree. More trees are damaged from weed eaters because the nick the bark and that causes scars and weak spots on the trunks.
If a tree stays small and wont seem to grow, we would strip off the leaves and take a stick and give the tree a good spanking. It forces the tree to go into survival mode and it will soon take off and grow like it should.
Soil and location and growing seasons will set the speed of growth but we would hit them twice a years with a little 13-13-13 fertilizer. Once in the spring and once in the fall.
Googal pruning methods to learn how to prune them to shape up the way you would like them to be. Pruning off the limbs that you don't want will make it grow faster because it gets rid of growth that it taking energy away from unwanted limbs and forces the ones you do want to grow faster. I would prune twice a year to keep sucker limbs off the tree and give that growing energy to what you plan to keep.
If you have enough trees to experiment with, you can try different pruning techniques and see the results for yourself. Good luck!
P.S. I have planted thousands of oaks and some will just naturally grow faster then the others even though the seeds came from the same tree and are grown in the same field. You will get crosses as well. It's all about the genetics of the seed.
The trees will grow taller and faster in the middle of the field vs on the edges, depending on how close they are planted. Keep the field mowed as much as possible while they are young, high grass will slow tree growth till they get bigger. Keeping low limbs on the trunks will make the trunks get bigger but it all depends on what you are looking for in your tree field.
Remember trees will get huge once they get grown so give them plenty of room and don't plant them to close together unless you want groups of trees or single trees that stand out on there own. The biggest mistake is planting to close together unless you can plant so many you can thin them out later.