Gardening - How do you grow an oak tree?

[Easy]

DS and daddy brought home some acorns from their walk. Some are green and still in their little cups, some have fallen out of their cup and are turning brown.

Does anyone know the optimum method for starting these off? Garden/pots, Outdoors/indoors, refidgerate first?

try bunging a few in a pot and leaving them outside over winter - they usually grow quite easily.

Two of mine came home last year with some, and unbeknown to me,planted them in some earth about 3 feet from the house. We only noticed them this summer. Unfortunately we had to pull them up instead of letting them grow, because they would have eventually uprooted the house, but they were surprisingly care free.

That's so good to hear that they grow so readily! I am encouraged to hunt out some acorns...

OMG this is such an obvious question for me! Dh, though Australian, has an obsessional desire to grow oak trees (don't ask why) and my children are obsessed with picking up acorns of which there are simply millions near us. We have planted both green and brown acorns in pots and left them in the garden for nature to do what it does best and I can categorically tell you that both sorts are capable of germinating. In the summer, dh occasionally waters his oak trees in their pots and mostly they seem to do very well. He is just waiting for us to move to a house with a small patch of land where he can transplant them all into the ground and create his very own oak woodland!
PS we also had a tree grow within inches of our front door which we had to uproot: one of the children's discarded acorns from last year!

We have a similar problem with the trees that have the little helicopters (sycamores?). They appear all over the garden thanks to the large one over the road - a couple are even growing in cracks right next to the house. They are too imbedded to pull out so I have been using root killer - I hope it is working otherwise we have will have issues later!

It didn't occur to DP to get rid of them when they first appeared a couple of years ago . . . just as well I moved in!

Right, bung them in pots then. Thats one activity for this weekend, we planted some spring bulbs last weekend, ds wants to know where the flowers are !!