Home Grown Oak Project
(Learning, Planting, Growing)
Our Story...
Sickles School is a Kindegarten through 3rd grade school in Fair Haven, NJ. Across from the school is a small 3 acre park where some beautiful oak trees grow...White Oaks, Black Oaks, and Northern Red Oaks. Every fall those big beautiful trees drop acorns to the ground.
So in September 2023, we decided to try an experiment, have the kindergarteners collect some of those acorns....
And so they did. Every day at recess those kindergarteners collected acorns (like this White Oak acorn...with Sickles School in the background).
Within a couple days, we needed more buckets.
Within a week they had collected over 4,000 acorns!!!
Thank you Mrs. Schwartz!!!
So in late-September we shipped those 4,000+ acorns down the street to Knollwood Middle School (4th through 8th grade), where the 7th graders placed the White Oak acorns into bottles of water to assist in the growth of the their tap roots for each acorn.
But first, we had to determine the healthy acorns from the unhealth ones.
We dropped the acorns in water and remove all the floating ones as they've been compromised.
The healthy acorns were place at the tops of bottles filled with water (and assisted by pipe cleaners to ensure the acorns didn't fall into the water). And some of them started to grow leaves very quickly.
In early December, we came back with lots of black dirt and moved the baby trees into pots.
We had lots of help from two different Green Teams (Knollwood Student Green Team guided by Jen Amabile and Fair Haven Green Team members).
All pots were labeled with the names of 7th graders.
It's a simple but tedious process moving an acorn from a plastic bottle to a pot of dirt.
Within a couple hours we transplanted 70 baby White Oak acorns into pots where they can grow to become small trees for Knollwood 2025 graduates! Thank you Mrs. Romano.
Our story will continue...
And soon we will house those baby oaks in a new green house to protect them from chipmunks and squirrels.