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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Osage Orange
  • Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:21:56 EDT

Bev,

If you must pick up the apples and plant the seeds therefrom, you might not
get a lot of trees. The things get to be a pest on farms whre cows eat the
fruit and the seedlings come up from their droppings.

As someone mentioed, OO makes excellent bow staves. This s because, like
yew, it has a hard inner wood that springs back from being compressed and an
elastic outer wood that springs back from being stretched. So, as with yew,
by
cutting the stave so that the belly of the bow is from the inner wood and the
back is from the outer wood, it acts as if it were laminated. There is a
market
for suitable straight grained staves in the longbow aficionados.

Also the apples bear a sort of vegetable renet which is why they were
propogated so much in days gone by.

They grow pretty quickly. The thorns will penetrate anything.

The wood bears a thick sticky sap that will gum up a chainsaw in two minutes.
Even a handsaw must be wiped with solvent periodically. An axe is the only
feasible tool to cut them and even then you are going to work hard at it.

If you do try to cut or cut back OO's, dress like a Star Wars storm trooper.
No kidding, without rather heavy armor you will be pucntured to death in a
short time.

The wood lasts forever. About 1975 I was claaring some area around the dairy
spring for my grandmother and struggling mightily in the wet mucky ground to
dig out a post that had served as gate post at one time. It was intact to
the
bottom, you could still see the axe marks on it in detail. My grandmother
waxed nostalgic and said, "I remember putting that post in (long story
involving
all and sundry dramatis personae of the family essued)." "When was this?"
"Oh it would have been ... let's see ... 1906."


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