Handling and storing acorns & chestnuts and sycamore fruits
Lead Author: Peter Gosling
We use some essential cookies to make this website work.
We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use forestresearch.gov.uk, remember your settings and improve our services.
We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services.
Preparing to search
Lead Author: Peter Gosling
The fruits of oaks, chestnuts and sycamore are extremely perishable. They are shed at a high moisture content and, unlike most fruits and seeds, are killed by very little drying. They are also frequently infected with fungi which thrive in the moist conditions necessary to avoid dehydration damage. The best advice is to nursery sow (or direct seed) these fruits in autumn as soon after collection as possible. This Note is aimed principally at commercial seed collectors, foresters and nursery managers who want to collect, handle(and if unavoidable, store) large quantities of seeds of these species as a prelude to raising commercial quantities of trees. But the same principles apply to small quantities of seeds.
Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website.
We use cookies to store information about how you use the dwi.gov.uk website, such as the pages you visit.
Find out more about cookies on forestresearch.gov.uk
We use 3 types of cookie. You can choose which cookies you're happy for us to use.
These essential cookies do things like remember your progress through a form. They always need to be on.
We use Google Analytics to measure how you use the website so we can improve it based on user needs. Google Analytics sets cookies that store anonymised information about: how you got to the site the pages you visit on forestresearch.gov.uk and how long you spend on each page what you click on while you're visiting the site
Some forestresearch.gov.uk pages may contain content from other sites, like YouTube or Flickr, which may set their own cookies. These sites are sometimes called ‘third party’ services. This tells us how many people are seeing the content and whether it’s useful.