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

I’m gonna 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 degrees seems to be the
the best temperature to kill those
pathogens at and you want to hold it
there for 20 minutes let’s go ahead and
dump our chestnuts in our cooler so
we’re gonna 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 and 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 gonna put them back
in the bowl we add them in the key
elements to proper cold stratification
is obviously cold moisture and air
here’s how we’re getting air to them so
we’re not going to put a lid on this so
they can get plenty of transpiration
going on Moisture we got this is just
some peat bogs we’re just going to cover
them with a little bit of peat now for
the cold part I’m gonna go set these in
our cold frame which is where we like to
stratify things
this is our cold frame we’re gonna set
these little buggies in here this would
be a nice place them to hang out for two
three months whatever it takes and
they’ll start to germinate so we’re just
gonna hang out in there for a little
while