Saturday, October 5, 2013

"seen" Osage Orange

Fruit of The Osage Orange Tree
Horse Apples we called them as kids. Rock hard and the size of grapefruits, they made good chunking material. Guaranteed to get your butt busted for throwing at cows, horses, or visiting cousins! Seems there was always a bois d'arc tree shading the watering tank for the livestock at the barn corral in those days. 

Prize Fruit
Drought-Wind-Heat-Cold! Resistant to all! In fact the Osage Orange Tree is a perfect match for life on the Plains. Soil where it grows makes no difference. As long as it's not waterlogged; the poorer the better!
Natural Fences
It was said that a fence had to meet certain requirements of being horse high,bull strong, and pig tight, and Osage Orange easily met those qualifications.
Steve Dobbs
Oklahoma Gardner's Guide

Early Shadows-Dropped Fruit-Poor Soil!
Found several Osage orange trees growing along the upper banks of Turtle Creek in a less visited part of our city park. Heavily wooded and almost impossible to make your way to the creek, I'm sure these trees are natural occurring and probably date back to when this area was a campground for drovers on the Chisholm Trail circa 1867-1884.

"SEENS"
eight 

10 comments:

  1. i see a few trees in my area but none on our property here. had one at our old place, though. one of my horses liked to eat the bois d'arc apples, but the others didn't like them.

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  2. That is a good memories! I saw some of these trees in the Kauai, and I did not realized it calls Osage Orange Tree. Thanks for sharing.

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  3. Interesting tree with equally interesting fruit, sounds pretty hardy too! The seed pods look similar to the seed pods from the Horse Chestnut trees that grow over here on the West Coast.

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  4. Looks interesting but I can't really say interesting as in tasty.

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  5. I have thrown a few of these at my brothers a time or two. Never new the name of the tree just called the fruit hedge apples.

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    1. Another name for the tree is yellow wood. My son and son in law have long bows made from this wood. Makes a real sharp bow!

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  6. we had these back in Nebraska, we referred to them as Hedge Apples. In the fall we used them to deter spiders and other unwanted bugs in the basement.

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    1. I always wondered if they had a use? Thanks for the tip.

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  7. Your post was time pretty well. My dad was here visiting last week and we had a discussion about what these are called. He called them osage oranges, which I had never heard of before and I have always called them hedge or horse apples. The hedge tree they come from is a very hard wood and grows like a weed. The ranchers up here use the trunks and limbs for fence posts because they will last 100 years.

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    1. Glad your dad made a trip to Kansas. Bet he had a good time looking around the farm.
      You're sure right about the hardness and long lasting qualities of the bois d' arc fence posts and corner posts. Some of the old pasture fences in Oklahoma still support bob wire from days past when posts were wood and cut from the Osage orange-"Harder than the Hubs of Hell", was my Dad's words!

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