Walnut has long ceased to be something outlandish in central Russia. At the moment, many breeding varieties adapted to frost and drought have been bred. Each gardener can grow a beautiful and strong tree in his personal plot that gives good harvests of fruits that are healthy for health. It is not necessary to buy ready-made seedlings, but you can plant a nut with seeds. When choosing the second method, you need to know how to germinate walnuts, how and when to plant them and how to care for them. All this will be discussed further.
Selection of planting material
Well, let's proceed to the answer to the question "how to sprout a walnut?". A successful result depends primarily on the choice of seeds for planting. The main criteria to be guided by are:
- The size of nuts (the largest possible fruits should be taken).
- The size and taste of the kernel (nuts should be tasty, and the kernels should completely fill the shell).
- The thickness of the shell (you should opt for fruits with a thin shell).
- Maturity and quality of nuts (fruits must be fully ripe, without any damage such as blackening, congenital deformities, etc.).
- Age of seeds (nuts for planting should be taken fresh, of the current year's crop, since last year and year before last fruit lose up to 50% of its germination).
Another important nuance in the topic of how to germinate a walnut at home is the method of acquiring seeds. It is immediately worth noting that in stores this is extremely undesirable, since there is no guarantee that they will be fresh. In general, finding high-quality planting material is not so easy, but you can try your luck in vegetable stalls.
The ideal option is to sprout walnuts and take them directly from the tree when they are ripe. But you should not pick up the fruits that managed to lie on the ground for a long time.
With the right choice of seed, you are guaranteed to get full, high-quality and healthy seedlings.
Preparatory work
Sowing of seeds is carried out in autumn or spring. Germination of seeds should begin 1-1.5 months before the planned date of planting in the ground. Before germinating a walnut for planting, it is necessary to carry out certain preparatory measures. Selected nuts are kept in a manganese solution for three days. After that, they are placed at the same time in some kind of stimulator for plant growth, for example, Zircon.
In the process of soaking nuts, the fluid must be changed daily, completely draining the old. The fact is that a large concentration of tannins and essential substances formed from the shell can adversely affect how successfully and how quickly the walnut will germinate.
Seed planting
After a week of water procedures, planting material must be dropped into a container. Before germinating walnuts, it is necessary to prepare the soil, consisting of sawdust and sand. To eliminate bacteria, sand should be calcined, and sawdust should be steamed. The resulting mixture is poured into the container to the thickness of the palm and moistened. On the resulting sand-sawdust pillow, nuts are laid “on the edge”. A layer of moistened soil is poured on top of a similar thickness.
The container should be placed in a warm place, but not near heating appliances. To preserve moisture in the soil, the container is covered with a film.
Seed germination
After 2-3 weeks after sowing, the topsoil is carefully removed without touching the nuts to check their germination. If the shell leaves have opened and a small white root appears, then the seeds have sprouted. For further cultivation, the container is rearranged on a sunny window, where the cultivation of seedlings continues until they are transplanted into the open ground.
It should be borne in mind that the timing of seed germination is far from always predictable. Fresh and high-quality planting material can come up in 10-12 days, and for seeds purchased in the store, it sometimes takes from 1 to 6 months. Germination rate depends on the time of seed collection and storage conditions, and these indicators are often simply unknown.
For example, seed that has fallen in the fall and matured in a natural way without additional stimulation with growth preparations, sprouts in the open ground only in May. Artificially planted nuts germinate in containers for the second week.
Planting stock storage
If autumn planting is not planned, you can save the seeds until spring. To do this, they are buried in a container with moistened sand and left for winter storage in a dark and cool place, for example, in a cellar or basement.
About a month before the May planting, the nuts are transferred to a soil mixture prepared for germination, consisting of heat-treated sand and sawdust and sprinkled with a growth stimulant. The container is carried out in a bright and warm place.
Winter storage of nuts in the sand prevents drying of the kernels, cracking of the shell, the formation of mold and parasites. When stored in plastic bags, all this cannot be avoided.
Germinated seedlings can be transplanted in May in open ground or grow in a container until the fall and plant them in October. If seedlings are grown in closed ground for a long time, it is necessary to transplant them twice a season in large containers with a diameter.
Seedlings grown in the spring, before planting in the ground must be hardened. To do this, they are taken outside for several hours daily. Gradually, the time spent on the street should be increased to a full day.
Conclusion
If you know how to germinate walnuts, follow the rules of further cultivation, feed and take care of seedlings in time, then planted in May in open ground, they will grow to 15 cm by September, and their roots will increase in length to 35 cm. The first crop with nuts planted with seeds can be obtained already in the 4th-5th year after planting.
Growing walnuts from seeds has one valuable property, namely: seedlings often surpass the mother tree in all qualitative indicators.