Growin’ Oaks

As an avid whitetail nut, I'm always watching deer, trying to figure out what they do, why, and what they eat when. With a bumper crop of acorns this year, the deer tend to be spending more time in the big woods eating acorns instead of migrating to the local farmers' cornfields. This is great news for me as I mostly hunt on state land where there are lots of oak trees and no cornfields. It doesn't make it easier  but it's more exciting just knowing that you might find deer almost anywhere that you find acorns, which is almost everywhere that I hunt.

This past week, as I was kicking around in the leaves to see if there were many white oak acorns left, I noticed some acorns that were already sprouting. This was really frustrating to me. Not because they were sprouting, well it was because they were sprouting, but let me explain myself.

About a month or so ago I started teaching the 4th and 5th grade Sunday school class at our church. As I was wanting to get to know the kids better, I asked them what they liked to do. One of the boys said that he liked to grow trees but never planted an oak tree. "Neat" I thought, "well maybe we can figure out how to get acorns to grow into oak trees". 

Since our class was starting with the creation story in Genesis, it fit perfectly. God made everything to reproduce after its own kind, and so we would plant some acorns and the oak trees would grow after their own kind.

I did a little research on the internet and what I found out was really neat. You take some acorns and put them in water. You throw out the ones that float as they won't sprout. You put the rest in Ziploc bags with some moist dirt, put that in the fridge and in a week or two they'll sprout. Then you can plant them or put the root in water in a small vase and watch the tree grow out of the top.

Well, the next Sunday we gathered some acorns, put them in a bag, and put them in the fridge. I went to the glass shop and made some tiny vases for the acorns. Several weeks went by. Nothing. Several more weeks and nothing. Maybe if we set them out in the sun for a few days? Nothing.

So back to my discovery in the deer woods. Acorns fell off the tree, got buried in leaves, got wet, and sprouted. Meanwhile,  I followed directions that were on the internet and, waa-laa . . . nothing. Go figure.

I brought some of the acorns home so that the kids would have some to plant and watch grow. 

I was still puzzled and wanted to know why my technique didn't work. I searched some more on the almighty internet and this is what I found. Apparently not all oaks are the same. Of course I knew that, but assumed that they were basically the same in how they reproduced. The internet says that white oaks can sprout within several weeks of falling but other oaks such as red oak, bur oak, chestnut oak, and others, require a different process that calls for a time of dormancy. The acorns that we had picked  were a hodpodge of different oak, apparently ones which germinate through an even slower process. OK, now it's making sense.

I was reminded of my kids and how raising them isn't quite as easy as one might think. We get lots of advice and read a book and think to ourselves, "man we got this".  But then we find out that kids are all different, and what works for one doesn't work for another. And often it feels like those that wrote the books and gave advice were growing maples and not oaks.

And just maybe, hopefully, as parents, we're a little bit like the wet leaves and the perfect timing for those little oaks that are sprouting in our worlds. There might be a scientific method for raising kids, but I believe God put each of those kids in each of our lives that he did, because he knows exactly what it takes to grow a little oak!