- Collect and prepare beech seeds
- Sow beech seeds
- The seed will germinate after a few weeks
- Beechnuts are poisonous
Beech seeds are more commonly known as beechnuts. They grow in a protective shell and are ripe from September. Beeches can be propagated from the nuts themselves. They can even be eaten roasted.
Beech nuts are the seeds of the beech tree
Collect and prepare beech seeds
- Collect beech seeds
- Stratify beechnuts
- sow in pots or soil
- keep moist
- protect against late frosts
Beeches bear fruit very irregularly. In the so-called fattening years, countless seeds fall to the ground, while in other years there is hardly a beechnut to be found.
Also, only beech trees between the ages of 40 and 80 bear fruit.
Collect the fruit if you want to propagate a beech tree yourself and eat the slightly poisonous nuts. If the seeds are to germinate, they must first be stratified, which means that they must go through a cold phase.
Sow beech seeds
The right time to sow beech is early spring.
To sow beech seeds, prepare small pots or choose a suitable spot in the garden.
Place beech seeds in the loose soil. Cover them with a layer of soil as thick as the beechnuts themselves.
The seed will germinate after a few weeks
It can take several weeks for the young beeches to germinate. At first only the cotyledons appear.
It takes a further time for the beech seedlings to grow into seedlings. They must be protected from frost and drying out until they are finally planted out.
Beechnuts are poisonous
If you collect beechnuts, make sure that children and pets do not eat them. The nuts contain the toxin fagin, which causes stomach problems.
Roasting or otherwise heating the beech seed breaks down the toxin. The beechnuts are then edible and can be ground into flour or processed in small pieces in the kitchen.
The brown skin around the beechnuts is easier to remove if you pour hot water over the beech seeds.
tips
The water test shows whether a beechnut is fertile. Place the beech seeds in a bowl of water. Any seeds that sink to the bottom are germinable, while the fruit floating at the top are hollow.