Prepping Chestnuts for Planting | Live Free or Die: How to Homestead

[Music] I'm going to show you how to start chestnut trees from seed. The first step is to find a chestnut tree. These are some chestnuts that we harvested. You want to promptly heat treat your chestnuts after harvesting them, or else you lose them to mold and chestnut weevils. Got some hot water here; 120° seems to be the best temperature to kill those pathogens at, and you want to hold it there for 20 minutes. So let's go ahead and dump our chestnuts in our cooler.

So we're going to go ahead and throw the lid on this. We got this thing right at 120, so all the mold spores and chestnut weevil eggs are dead. Now the next step in the process is called cold stratification. What cold stratification does is it leads the chestnut to believe that it's gone through a winter and it's ready to germinate. I'm just going to put them back in the bowl we had them in. The key elements to proper cold stratification are obviously cold moisture and air.

Here's how we're getting air to them: we're not going to put a lid on this so they can get plenty of transpiration going on. For moisture, we got these; it's just some peat moss. We're just going to cover them with a little bit of peat. Now for the cold part, I'm going to go set these in our cold frame, which is where we like to stratify things. This is our cold frame; we're going to set these little boogies in here. This will be a nice place for them to hang out for 2-3 months, whatever it takes, and they'll start to germinate. So they're just going to hang out in there for a little while.