Quercus Robur or English Oaks is one of my favorite trees. We had a really big one on the piece of land next to our house. Had that is, Yesterday the new owners of the land cut it down together with all the other trees on it. A damn shame…

But for over a year I had my eye on a few young oaks that grew from the acorns of that big oak and wanted to collect them at some time. That time was yesterday since there was no more time. Luckely for me it’s a good time of the year to dig young oaks and the excavators hadn’t reached the spot where they grew yet. I managed to salvage 2 of them.

Here’s one of them, I put it in the first pot I could find and covered the roots with some dirt:

A few hours later I had prepared everything to put it in a decent pot with decent soil. So I took it out of the first pot and inspected the roots. They looked pretty good, lots of small hair roots. I left most of the tap root intact and will shorten that in a few years.

The new pot I put the tree in is a 20L or 5 gallon nursery container. I filled it with a drainage layer and after that with my bonsai soil mix making sure there were no air holes between the roots.

When enough soil was in the container the tree got a good watering and after that it was put in a cold storage. Notice the cut down parent tree in the back 😦

No pruning is necessary because the youngster has a lot of small roots and the big branches will help thicken the trunk next year. Also I’m not going to let frost get to the tree this winter for safety reasons. Let’s hope he and his brother/sister start up again next spring.