All the Dirt on Gardening

With cooler temperatures and fewer hours of daylight, the Osage Orange trees are dropping their fruit. As the fruit rots, squirrels eat the seeds, insects come to eat the fruit and the birds eat the insects.  Though they are called many names ,  hedge apples, bowwood, bois d'arc (bow wood) bodark, geelhout, mock orange, horse apple, naranjo chino, wild orange and yellow-wood, the Latin name is Maclura pomifera. This mulberry family member was named after William Maclure, an American geologist. The fruit is widely sold at farmer and craft markets for use as a fall decoration on the front porch. Others put them in the pantry, behind furniture and around the outside of their house foundation for their use as a natural extermination method. The active chemical is a fungicide, tetrahydroxystilbene. Here's how to dry them to use inside against spiders http://www.gardentrappings.com/diy-drying-osage-oranges-or-hedge-apples The long sharp thorns on the stems have ...

Osage Orange trees are advertised in plant catalogs as small to mid-sized, meaning they become 30-to-50 feet tall, with a 40-foot wide crown at maturity. It is said that in early American history, these thorny trees were planted along property lines as fences, keeping animals in and strangers out, and making prairie settlement possible. Osage Orange fence posts took root across the prairie and made thickets in ravines and farmsteads. The many names that Maclura pomifera is known by include: Orange wood, bois-d'arc, bodark, bowwood, hedge-apple, mockorange, and live barbed wire. The wood of this mulberry family member is not only strong enough to make hunting bows, it is the only tree that produces orange wood. The Lewis and Clark expedition noted finding it in St. Louis, MO in 1804. Early settlers used the root bark to make a yellow dye. Native to Arkansas, Oklahoma and eastern Texas, Maclura pomifera are now found in zones 4 to 9, from New England to southern Colora...