One of my garden projects this winter is chilling some bigtooth maple (Acer grandidentatum) seeds outside to see if they’ll sprout in the spring. I collected the seeds in the fall from a grove that had some really awesome red leaves. In fact, here’s a photo of me and Dana (my lovely wife) at that spot.
These are native to Utah, and I’m hoping they’ll grow well at my home’s altitude — not just up in the canyons. One reason for wanting to grow them is that the soil here is so alkaline that some other maples get chlorotic. I have three large “Autumn Blaze” maples, which are a hybrid red maple, and they’re supposed to be fine in alkaline soils, but one has signs of chlorosis — yellowing, veiny leaves. I need to figure out how to help that tree next season.
Anyway, local gardening guru Larry Sagers had a column in the Deseret News in November about these trees, and it was very informative. Check it out here: deseretnews.com | Native maple may be made even nicer
I believe these maple seeds were actually Rocky Mountain Maple (Acer glabrum), not Bigtooth Maple (Acer grandidentatum). The seedling I got from the seed has a more serrated leaf than the Bigtooth photos I’ve looked at.
This process of chilling the seeds is called stratification. I don’t know why they call it that — you’d think stratifying things would involve grouping them into some kind of layers or something, based on what the word normally means. But not in the world of seed growing. There’s more about stratification at wikipedia.