When the families got together and there were about 20 cousins we had to find something to get in trouble with…. I remember the magnolia pods too but the horse apples were everywhere……. It would never work in this day and time! No one would go “tell” no matter how bad they were hurt or everyone would pay for it……
I never recognized the orange smell…… just thought they smelled really bad! The background info on it was interesting. Thanks for offering that.
Yeah, lots of folks know it simply by the name “hedge” for that reason.
And pretty much the best firewood there is. I’ve never cut or burned it, just have read other’s accounts. It will supposedly dull a chainsaw blade fairly quickly. It also sparks fairly heavily as it burns.
we would clump burdock burrs together and throw them at each other. got some bad rashes from that. i used to tape tubing on my bike handle bars to put bottle rockets in and shoot them at each other Madmax style. oh…the good ol’ days. i can testify to the impenetrability of those osage orange tree branches once they grow together. nasty stuff!
I think me and you and Katy had very similar childhoods! Its a miracle we never put anyone’s eye out with bottle rockets or caused other serious injuries doing things we did. And Katy is right…back then if someone did have an injury everyone else would make them “walk it off” to keep the parents from knowing what crazy stuff we had been doing, ha. Like you say, those were such good ol’ days! We never knew how good we had it - no jobs, no responsibilities, goofing off all summer, riding bikes or mopeds (I was king of the world when I got a moped! haha) anywhere we wanted to go, etc. Ahh…good times.
bought a used yamaha enduro 150 dirt bike at 15 with potato picking money. loved that thing! would ride all day on $2 of gas. would even go grouse hunting in the fall with it. great times!
I bought my brother’s car when I was 15 with newspaper money I had been saving. We had what was called mini bikes to ride the fields and woods on. Solid frame. No springs, solid forks a seat wheels and a 5 horse Tecumseh or Brigs Stratton motor we took the governor off of and ran with our hand on the throttle cable. Crazy fun stuff.
my youngest brother did some thing like that. made a 3 wheel chopper looking thing with a 12 hp motor. it was direct drive so once started it went. throttle got stuck and it didnt have brakes. he went around and around the house with us running after him trying to hit the sparkplug with a wrench finally Dad threw him a screwdriver and he reached back and managed to ground the plug. shredded the lawn but we laughed about that for a long time.
I bought a rachio controller, they are supposed to be pretty good.
Kevin,
This (Maclura pomifera) is a dioecious species - separate male and female trees. There are a few (mostly) thornless males that have been selected and propagated in the nursery trade… they can be a handsome tree, with few insect pests or disease issues… and the males do not produce those big ol’ ‘monkey-brain’ fruits.
I’ve read accounts of farmers/ranchers out west - back in the day - gathering the fruits in barrels, allowing them to blet(rot) over winter, then plowing a furrow and pouring the resulting ‘sludge’ of seeds & rotted flesh down the furrow, yielding a ‘living fence’ of seedlings popping up in high stem-density populations.
Cattle will eat the bletted fruits, and occasionally ‘choke’ (esophageal obstruction) on those that they’ve not chewed sufficiently, leading to acute bloat and death, if not attended to. I also see squirrels (and probably voles & field mice) gnaw through the fruits to eat the hundreds of little sunflower seed kernel-sized seeds . There are few things (to me) that stink worse than well-rotted Osage Orange fruits.
Osage Orange was not at all common in east-central AL where I grew up… I had relatives in Montgomery that had one in their yard - they called it a ‘mock-orange’ ( a name which I was also accustomed to being commonly assigned to Philadelphus spp. shrubs, which some folks also called ‘English dogwood’). I also would find the OO fruits out in the ‘swamp’ on the farm, when Saugahatchee Creek would get out of its banks and wash things downstream and out into its floodplain.
There were lots of them on rocky outcrops in pastures in northern Giles Co., TN when we lived there. They’re probably still there…
And… if you didn’t know, Maclura pomifera is in the Moraceae family- related to mulberries, figs, and the infamous Che fruit, which, to me, very much resemble Osage Orange fruits of a more diminutive size.
As kids here we called them “monkey balls.” They’re a good substitute, if you don’t have black walnuts handy, and need to attack children. Probably shouldn’t do that as an adult, though. I saw a video of somebody trying to eat them/process them into something. (It went hilariously poorly.) They’re full of latex apparently, and not good eats.
Q: Do the Kenmore (NY9) and Castleton European plum blooms overlap? And can they cross pollinate each other? I couldn’t tell if they were relatives or not, or if that would be an issue. The harvest windows are spread out very nicely. Would they be good cultivars for somebody who likes the “prune plums” at the grocery store and just wants something really sweet? I’ve seen them described as “dual use.”
Fascinating information! I didn’t know any of that. Everyone seemed surprised that I said mine smelled like citrus but I went back and took a few more sniffs and it definitely does. Not sure if that has anything to do with the name. I also know that you were talking about the stink when they rot, which mine had not done. I can also concur with your observations that small animals try to eat part of them…a few of the ones laying around on the ground had clearly been gnawed on by some kind of small animal.
Thanks for the info. I’ve learned a lot from all these replies.
Chickasaw Plums: Is it worth growing a named cultivar like Guthrie over a hybrid or Japanese plum? Northeast Texas if that matters. No big issues with Japanese plums minus borers and the worms occasionally.
@ chadspur,
I tried a number of Japanese hybrid and a few European plums. Brown rot got them all. Actually, I think I did get ONE edible plum one year.
I have thickets of two different native Chickasaws which I started from rootsuckers - one with a big yellow fruit, the other with a smaller red-skinned fruit. Almost no brown rot issues, and PC damage is minimal. I’ve grafted Guthrie into the yellow-fruited thicket, on several stems. The plums are 50% larger than the native fruit, and has a very noticeable ‘peach’ flavor about it. It’s a winner, here… Chickasaws have been the ONLY stonefruit worth the space they’ve occupied.
Peach flavor sounds good! Thanks for the information. I’m going to try to locate one or some wood. I’m reading Chickasaw is pretty good about rooting from cuttings.
@chadspur
Last time I looked for some decent shoots to cut for scions from my Guthrie bushes, I couldn’t really find any good vigorous growth… but there may be other folks here that can provide you with some scions of Guthrie, Odom, and other Chickasaw cultivars.
As I’ve talked about here before, a few years ago I did find some wild plums and transplanted some root suckers and grew several nice trees from them (bushes is probably a more accurate word). I have no idea if they are Chickasaws or what they are, but they are just not very good to eat. The taste is ok but its miles from the sweetness of any of my Japanese plums. Also, the “meat” to pit ratio on my wild plums is pretty low- in other words, they are mostly seed. Last but not least, mine ARE very susceptible to PC. In fact, if not sprayed I lose them all. They don’t get brown rot, though.
I wish there was some way I could figure out exactly what kind of wild plum mine are. I sent some to DennisD last year and he got one to live, so maybe he will figure it out for me.
But knowing they need to be sprayed, don’t taste as good, don’t have as much flesh, there is just no way I can see growing them being preferable to regular domesticated Japanese Plums. But it sounds like my wilds aren’t as good as Lucky’s!
I’m reading through my notes from last year and aphids took over multiple times. I have a real fear and horror of them and it was terrible, they covered a plum tree, then the roses and eventually the cabbage and kale were covered.
I used neem and it would knock them back for a day or so. we have a lot of ladybugs and mantis and I use beneficial nematodes. at one point I got angry and used sevin on a rose that didn’t have any flowers left. it didn’t seem to help a lot.
is there anything I can do to prevent that from happening this coming year? any way I can stave them off from the start, or will I be spraying something again? and what is best to use- the Neem didn’t seem to help much.
I’ve had a few bad aphid years as well, when the green peach aphids overwhelm the ladybugs and ignore my neem sprays. I’ve found that pyrethrin-based sprays, especially when mixed with insecticidal soap, will effectively knock them down and allow the ladybugs to regain control.
Spraying early in the season,with a mixture of vegetable oil and dish soap in water,about the time,first color is seen on the flower buds,should help.Aphids over winter in crevices of tree bark.The mixture smothers them.If it’s rainy,repeating will probably help.
There are also insecticides like, Ortho Tree & Shrub-Fruit Tree Spray,Triazicide Once and Done and AzaMax.
I also had severe aphid issues last year. Using a dish soap emulsion such as “dawn” helped a bit. Unfortunately dish soap burnt the leaves badly on some fruit trees even when sprayed on at night.
This year I’m planning on using the methods described in the following videos that combines other ingrediants for supposedly better effectiveness.
Has anyone tried similar concoctions?
How would you rate the effectiveness of your formula?
If your preferred ingrediants differ substantially, could you list your most effective formulation for killing aphids.
