My sawtooths are having one of their best years ever. My late-dropping ones are loaded too but not nearly as well-developed. These will start dropping in a couple to three weeks.
Thought some of y'all might enjoy this. This is acorns off my trees with three different drop times---the left one is the early drops that are dropping now. Middle is the October-drop ones that will start in a couple weeks, and the last is the late drop ones which start late-October to early-November. If it doesn't rain soon they may start dropping sooner.
It happened by blind luck. I wasn't even going to plant any sawtooths. But, I ordered a few trees from a guy I'm acquainted with who was selling them to me for 70 cents apiece. I asked him to get me about a dozen Chinese Chestnut trees. When he delivered the trees I could see immediately (because the dead leaves were still hanging) that they were sawtooths instead of chestnuts. It wasn't much money, and he was a good guy, so I said nothing and took the trees.
They were very slow to start bearing, but when they finally started, they really put out the nuts. Last year I watched them closely, and they dropped right through our gun season.
I’m going from memory but I think around 8 years. I know that the trees were probably 17 feet tall before we saw the first acorns. That was 3 years ago, and the last two years they have been loaded.
Bare-root planted trees seem to drag about fruiting. Maybe 8 to 10 years to heavy bearing but the ones I’ve started in pots and transplanted without shocking the roots normally start in 5 years or so—-if planted with plenty of sun.
After looking at my Sawtooth trees today, I have to make a minor correction on my above post. While most still look like they will be dropping in November again, I do have 2 or 3 trees that have started dropping this week. So, a correction would be that most of my trees are still dropping in our November gun season but some start around mid October.
The deer are hammering the ones that have dropped, despite lots of native acorns in the nearby woods.