# Seed sowing planner

> Chinese Chestnut · nuts · outdoors in fall. First: Sow now. Never let them dry.

Blue Whale Trees, a native tree nursery in the United States. Web version: https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/?species=chinese-chestnut

Try [white oak](https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/index.html.md?species=white-oak), [pawpaw](https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/index.html.md?species=pawpaw) or [eastern redbud](https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/index.html.md?species=eastern-redbud).

The planner turns the tree's own sowing advice into dates: when to break a hard seed coat, start the cold stratification, check the bag, plant it and expect seedlings. Pick a species and a sowing time, outdoors this fall or in the refrigerator for spring. Add your state and zone, or a ZIP code, and the dates follow your local frosts. The chart under the planner covers every tree and shrub we grow, sold as seed or not. The 45 common natives we do not grow stand in a group of their own under them, from their sources. Seed a tree drops in your yard follows the same rules.

Without JavaScript the inputs cannot be changed here: the plan shown is for the inputs in the address, or the planner's own example. The chart below gives every species' treatment, depth and timing, and each plant page's How to grow section gives the sowing advice in full.

![Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) leaves and long pale catkins in early summer](https://bluewhaletrees.com/img/plants/chinese-chestnut-160.jpg)

*Photo: Zhangzhugang, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped · [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castanea_mollissima,_Hangzhou_Botanical_Garden_2018.06.03_15-39-04.jpg)*

## Chinese Chestnut · nuts · outdoors in fall

Starting point

**Keep the nuts damp and cool from the day you gather or receive them, never dry and never frozen: a nut that dries out is dead.**

1. Sow now Sow outdoors now, before the ground freezes, an inch deep, under hardware cloth pinned down against mice, squirrels and jays. Winter supplies the cold.
2. Through winter Leave the bed alone: no watering once the ground is cold, the screen in place, mulch pulled back in early spring.

**Seedlings.** Seedlings come up in spring.

### Where this comes from: 4 sources

- **Treatment:** Cold, damp winter; cold 30 to 90 days; an inch deep.
- **Frost dates:** none chosen, so the plan uses April 15 and a fall bed from mid September to mid December. Choose your state and zone for local dates.
- **Its page says:** Nuts must never dry out, so keep them cool and damp until you sow, plant them an inch deep, and pin hardware cloth over the row against mice and squirrels.
- **Woody Plant Seed Manual (USDA Forest Service, 2008):** Castanea chapter: For nuts that have not been stored moist, or if a deeper dormancy than usual is suspected, then stratification should be used; 1 to 3 months is the recommended period for American and Chinese chestnuts (Dirr and Heuser 1987; Jaynes 1975).

[See Chinese Chestnut](https://bluewhaletrees.com/plants/chinese-chestnut/index.html.md)

Ask what is ready: [put it on my request list](https://bluewhaletrees.com/list/#items=chinese-chestnut:1).

On paper this page prints the example alone. Choose a species and its plan prints; the chart of every species stays on the web page.

## Sowing chart: treatment, depth and timing

Cold days are the cold, damp spell the seed needs, in the refrigerator or through a winter outdoors; warm days, where given, come first. "At once" means the seed roots within days of dropping and must be sown fresh. Every figure is a range in practice, and the plant page has the sentence behind it.

| Tree | Sown as | Treatment | Cold days | Depth | Sow | Seedlings | We sell |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **[Chinese Chestnut](https://bluewhaletrees.com/plants/chinese-chestnut/index.html.md)** (*Castanea mollissima*) | Nuts (never dry) | Cold, damp winter | 30–90 | 1" | Fall, or spring after chilling | Spring | [Nuts](https://bluewhaletrees.com/shop/acorns-and-seed/index.html.md) |

This chart holds only the species this address names. Every species' row is in the [whole chart](https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/index.html.md) and in its [CSV file](https://bluewhaletrees.com/data/sowing.csv).

## How the dates are worked out

Each tree's treatment, depth and timing come from its own page's How to grow section, which we wrote from the Forest Service's silvics, the state extension services and the [Woody Plant Seed Manual](https://www.fs.usda.gov/nsl/Wpsm/Genera.htm). Where the page gives no day count, the count comes from the seed manual's chapter on the genus, and the plan says so. The refrigerator route counts back from your sowing date: the cold spell starts that many days before it, a warm spell before that where the seed needs one, and a hard coat is broken the day before the spell begins. The hickories' nuts are soaked from two to four days before it instead, as their pages say. Where a page gives its own temperature for a stage, as for the huckleberries' cool spell, the step gives it too. No stage is ever dated before today. When the longest spell would have begun already, the plan starts today, since each spell is a range. When even the shortest spells cannot finish by the coming spring, the plan sows the spring after and says so. A sowing date that has already passed moves to the same day in the first year the stages can reach. The fall route needs only a sowing window: the winter supplies the cold and, for seed with a double dormancy, the next summer supplies the warmth, which is why those seedlings come up the second spring. Sowing outdoors this way, in a bed or, for small seed, in covered containers such as milk jugs, is what many gardeners call winter sowing. The 45 common natives we do not grow, in the second chart, take their treatment, depth and timing from their sources, the Woody Plant Seed Manual first, and a plan for one says "Its sources say" where a catalog plant's says "Its page says".

Some seed fits neither route as it stands. Seed that must be sown as it ripens, such as willow, cottonwood and swamp privet, gets the same plan on both: sow it the day it is gathered or arrives. Seed whose page sows it indoors in winter, such as the native azaleas and rhododendrons, is planned for December to February, or for January where the page says so. Where neither the page nor the seed manual gives a day count for the cold, the refrigerator route has no dates, and the plan points to the fall bed where the sources give one. Where no source gives a tested way to sow the seed at all, neither route has dates.

## Common questions

### When should you plant acorns?

White oak acorns sprout soon after they fall, so sow them at once, an inch deep. Northern red oak acorns need a winter first: sow them in fall, or chill them damp in the refrigerator for 30 to 45 days and sow in spring.

### How do you cold stratify seeds in the refrigerator?

Hold the seed damp in the refrigerator for the cold its species needs, 30 to 45 days for northern red oak or 100 for pawpaw, ending on your spring sowing date. The Woody Plant Seed Manual chills seed at 34 to 41 °F.

### Why do some tree seeds take two years to sprout?

Seed with a double dormancy needs a warm spell and then a cold one. Sown in a fall bed, it comes up the second spring, after a summer and a second winter in the bed.

### Can acorns dry out before you plant them?

No: acorns, chestnuts, chinquapins, buckeyes, pawpaws, magnolias and a few others die when they dry out. Keep them damp and cool from the day you gather or receive them, never dry and never frozen.

### How late in the fall can you sow tree seeds outdoors?

The planner's window for a fall bed runs from mid September, or from the first frost where that comes sooner, until the first night at 20 °F. That night is our own reading, and without a state and zone the planner uses mid September to mid December.

## The table as a file

The files and the citation below name this table *Seed sowing chart: treatment, depth and timing for every species*. Download it as [CSV](https://bluewhaletrees.com/data/sowing.csv) or [JSON](https://bluewhaletrees.com/data/sowing.json): 423 rows, one for one tree or shrub the nursery grows, with the columns below. It is one of the reference tables on [the open data page](https://bluewhaletrees.com/articles/open-data/index.html.md). The figures are published under the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license: use them with a credit to bluewhaletrees.com and a link to this page. Updated 2026-10-29.

### What each column means

- **slug**: the plant page's address word: the page is https://bluewhaletrees.com/plants/ followed by the slug and a slash
- **name**: the common name the page uses
- **seed**: what is sown: acorns, nuts or seed
- **keep**: how the seed keeps: never-dry when it dies if it dries or freezes, dry when it stores dry and cool
- **route**: the treatment: fresh, cold, warm-cold, scarify, scarify-cold, surface, surface-cold, plain, trial or none. Fresh is sown as it drops, cold needs a cold spell, warm-cold a warm spell then cold, scarify a nicked hard coat, and scarify-cold a broken coat then a cold spell. Surface is surface-sown, mostly for light, surface-cold a cold spell then surface sowing, plain sowing with no treatment, trial a seed with no tested way known, and none nothing the nursery sows
- **cold_days**: the days of cold, moist treatment the route needs, where it needs one
- **warm_days**: the days of warm, moist treatment before the cold, where the route needs one
- **scarify**: how the coat is broken before sowing: soak, hot-water, file or acid; empty where it is not
- **light**: true when the seed needs light and is sown on the surface, false where the planner's record says it needs none, and empty where the record does not say. The planner sows a false row and an empty one alike
- **depth_in**: the sowing depth in inches
- **fall**: true when fall sowing outdoors gives the seed its cold spell
- **emerge**: when the seedlings come up, in the planner's words: fall, spring, late spring, second spring, first or second spring, second or third spring, or "spring, some the second". For seed that sprouts soon after sowing, the row reads within days of sowing, within a week or two of sowing or within weeks of sowing. Empty where the planner gives no season
- **guide**: the plant page's own sowing sentence

### How the table is made

Each row is read from the plant page's How to grow section. That section follows the USDA Forest Service's Woody Plant Seed Manual for the treatment and the depth, and the planner's own rules for the timing. The files are written from the sowing records and checked against them at every release, so they never lag the planner.

### Cite this page

Copy a link or a reference. A press on a box copies it.

A link, as HTML

```
<a href="https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/">Seed sowing chart: treatment, depth and timing for every species</a>, Blue Whale Trees, updated October 29, 2026.
```

A reference, in APA style

```
Blue Whale Trees. (2026, October 29). Seed sowing chart: treatment, depth and timing for every species. https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/
```

The local dates come from [NOAA's 1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/us-climate-normals): for your state and zone, the median of the weather stations there. The last spring frost sets the spring sowing date and the spring look at a fall bed. Seed that comes up in late spring is looked for about seven weeks later. From January until the next fall, a fall-bed plan also says when last fall's sowing should come up. A fall bed can be sown from mid September, or from the first frost where that comes sooner, until the first night at 20 °F. Soil freezes from the surface down as the cold goes on ([University of Minnesota Extension](https://extension.umn.edu/about/our-stories/news/natural-resources-news/frozen-forests)), so the ground can still be dug that night. The extension names no temperature, so the 20 °F night is our own reading. Where winters average fewer than 20 nights at or below freezing, the plan warns that a fall bed may not chill the seed. That count is our own reading of the NOAA figures: such winters average 52 °F or warmer, above the 34 to 41 °F the seed manual chills seed at. A ZIP code finds its zone in the 2023 USDA map's ZIP listing and its state in the Census Bureau's ZIP code areas. Without a state and zone, the plan uses April 15 and a fall bed from mid September to mid December. The state and zone you choose are kept on this device for your next visit. A link copied from the planner carries the species, the way of sowing, the spring date, the state and the zone. The page draws the plan for them before any script runs, so a shared link shows the dates themselves.

Germination varies with the seed lot, the storage and the weather, so every count is a range and every date a starting point; a seed that sprouts in the bag is sown that day whatever the calendar says. Acorns, chestnuts, chinquapins, buckeyes, pawpaws, magnolias and a few others die when they dry out, so those plans open with the storage rule. The whole process, from collecting sound seed to the first year, is in [Planting acorns, nuts and seed](https://bluewhaletrees.com/articles/planting-acorns-nuts-and-seed/index.html.md); the seedling's first summer is the [watering calculator](https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/watering/index.html.md)'s job and its next twenty years the [growth estimator](https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/growth/index.html.md)'s. For acorns from an oak the list lacks, the leaf test that tells a white oak from a red oak is in [Red oaks and white oaks](https://bluewhaletrees.com/articles/red-oaks-and-white-oaks/index.html.md).

The address carries the seed sowing planner's inputs, so a link opens it filled in, and Copy link on a result writes one: species (a plant's slug, the last part of its page's address, such as white-oak), method (fall for a bed sown outdoors in fall, fridge for a cold spell in the refrigerator), date (the sowing day, a day as YYYY-MM-DD), state (a state's two letters, such as OH), zone (a whole number from 1 to 13, for the frost dates). For example, [/tools/sowing/?species=white-oak&method=fall&state=OH&zone=6](https://bluewhaletrees.com/tools/sowing/index.html.md?species=white-oak&method=fall&state=OH&zone=6).