i had the same problem with some of my cucumber seedlings, direct sown. Something nibbled a few of them, left on leaf on the ground. In this case, being the edge, I 'm guessing a rabbit, as the others weren't touched. A cutworm leaves nothing behind, right?

Wow! Your oaks and hickories look great folks. When you say a couple years old Pignut...is that exactly 2? I have some Shagbark seedlings going on 3 years and they are about 4 inches tall. I hope this year is the first they really start rocketing up. The first year the rabbits got their teeth on them, but I learned my lesson! Our mockernuts are all growing great. One is pushing about 5 feet in 3 years. These should all be opening in the next week. Hopefully just after the cold snap tonight!

If you have room for all of them, plant em all and enjoy the faster growing ones as they get big fast and the slower growing ones will in time be worth the wait. I have a BURR oak that grows faster than my 2 Q. Alba's have, BUT, it was a special kind that came from a HUGE acorn that a fellow Garden web person gave me. I have several Red oak family oaks that have grown sorta fast BUT I also have some white oak family oaks that grow about as fast as the red oak family oaks. I think the site they are growing on also matters a good bit also. My 2 Q. Albas are pretty slow growing though, I must say, BUT, everybody has different planting sites. Sometimes with certain trees I do wonder, "is it the area the tree is in, or genetics?" I have 2 Q. Robur's I got at the same time from the same person, and 1 of them has grown like a freakin Jacks Beanstock and 1 has just done "average". Now, the "Beanstocks" place used to have some horse poop near it, BUT, the OTHER Q. Robur is really close to a, area where another but OLDER source of horse poop used to be, I have a shrub there that has been growing like wild in that space from that same soil where we used to have a horse barn for about 25 years, in other words that other Q. Robur that hasn't taken off like the "Beanstock" one has is very close to the area where that OLDER pile of poop was many years ago, and actually, once that Q. Roburs roots get to wandering around I thi nk that IT will also tap into that very rich soil. My "Beanstock Q. Robur was basically planted about 5 feet from where the horse poop pile had been about 10 years before I planted it, so, it surely had a nice amount of rich soil to tap into from the get go, PLUS, it was close to the house and I had surely watered it when it hadn't rained very often. That "Beanstock" Q, Robur has also put out a few acorns as of the last couple of years and it is pretty young, maybe 7-8 years old, that is a guess, I do have a bunch of pics with dates on them, BUT, for now, I'll just guess.

Oh......this sounds familiar. When I start oaks, the chipmunks come into the greenhouses and chew them off shortly after they throw out their cotyledons to get at the nut as it rises out of the soil. I find pots of them with their young stems laying on the benches like mega cutworms got to them. Then when I plant the survivors, the mice and voles crawl under the snow to chew at the base of the tender saplings. They get a little bigger, and the cats will use them for scratching posts. Get 'em up a decent size and the bucks rub their velvet on them. sigh.