Members of the West Virginia chapter gather in mid-March to pot chestnuts. In readiness for potting, the bags of nuts that were stratified over the winter in a refrigerator were checked in mid-February to see how many had radicals. In the photo, there is a wide range of response to stratification from nuts that have not yet sent out a radical (nut on far left) to nuts with radicals that are several inches long (nut on far right). About 30% of the nuts that were bagged last September had a visible radical.
Nuts germinating in mid-February