Wanted: Osage orange

I'm looking for somewhere close to Vidalia Georgia that I can pick up some hedge apples

Any luck finding Osage Orange?

are yall looking for young trees, or fruits, or seeds? I have or can get all those. I am in Atlanta.

i’m not the original poster, but i’d love either some seed or young trees. i’m in western north carolina, though, so i would need whatever i was shipped. got a few possibilities to trade if you’re interested. pm me if you think we could work something out.

Greg, how many hedge apples do you want?  Would a 5-gallon bucket do?  Maybe 2?  The reason I ask is that my parents have a rather large Osage Orange tree in their yard and it produces prolific quantities of hedge apples.  I have mentioned to them before how many people on Permies really want these.  At present they just chuck tractor buckets full into an obscure corner of their property and let them stay there.  If you like, I am sure that we could arrange something.

Eric

Eric, how readily will those hedge apple seeds germinate? A few years back I smashed a few hedge apples and buried the pulps along the fence line. I didn't see any seedling coming up. In the wild I usually see a solitary tree rather than a thick stand. Maybe one does need bucket full of fruits to ensure good germination.

honestly, 1 or 2 ‘apples’ or ‘oranges’ ought to be enough. i just want a couple of young trees to graft che fruit onto. one of my references says storing the whole (or mashed) fruit outside over the winter should yield something like 60% germination. i’m relatively sure that if i try a few different tricks i’ll get enough success for my meager plans.

May, sorry I responded to the wrong poster!

I honestly have no idea how long it will take for these seeds to germinate.  Are you looking for a whole hedge or just one to two trees/bushes?  If you don't mind springing for shipping for a 5 gallon bucket, I am sure that we could get at least some of those to germinate.

Eric

Hi Eric, I have wild trees by the road to pick fruits from. Thanks for asking. I am just feeling they don't sprout as easily as other local species such as redbud, oak or black walnut.  My kids have been playing and tossing the fruits everywhere,  I would expect to see volunteers through the years but there's none. Maybe starting the seeds in a pot will increase the success rate. Do you find lots of seedlings coming out of your parent's pile with buried fruits?

Anyway, here I got some seeds cleaned. Greg, if you are interested, pm me the address I can get it out in the mail.

May,

Honestly, I have not seen any sprouts, but I have not looked and my parents mow relentlessly.  Also, they tend to pile up the hedgeapples so there really is very little ground for sprouting in the first place.  But by my parents house, Osage Orange grows wild all over the place.

Across from my parents house is land that has sat basically untouched except for some mowing and seasonal maintenance since at least the 70s when my parents first moved to the area.  I can remember this land from childhood and one the the features that stood out were these fence posts that looked TERRIBLE upon first glance.  They were darkish gray and twisted.  But they had been in place for likely decades.  Those same fence posts are sitting there, completely unchanged 50 years later!  Osage is amazingly durable wood.  Very few other species would stand up to sun and snow and ice and rain and soil contact and not rot completely in 10 years, but these fence posts might have been here for a century.  Honestly, I have no way of knowing the age of these posts as they just refuse to show any signs of aging.

I have always been impressed by Osage Orange.

Eric

I wanted to add that if one had just one hedge row of Osage Orange, or even just a couple of bushes/trees of decent size, one might be able to have a virtually unlimited supply of winter firewood by using a RMH.

Growing up we had a fireplace (I know--a really terrible heating device!), and we had a supply of Osage Orange that was larger than we could use in a season.  We had been warned not to use more than one log of Osage in the fireplace at a time as any more actually ran the risk of melting the fireplace grate and damaging the insides of the firebox!

When we did burn Osage, it was always something of a treat.  We would start the fire using some smaller pieces (probably oak) and sat the Osage on top.  The Osage did not start burning terribly quickly, but then we were burning a fairly large log.  But when it did start, the log did not so much burn with a bright flame as it did smolder very, very hot!  There would sometimes be little blue flames that would lick up from the underside of the log, but for the most part, the log just appeared to smolder bright orange to white hot.  The log burned a long, long time--hours.  And it put out a tremendous amount of heat!

I would guess that if the Osage were split into long, narrow lengths (a challenge as Osage is stringy and does not like to split so easily), a small batch fed into the hopper of an RMH would burn very, very hot for quite a long time with virtually no visible flame (maybe just a little bit of blue flames near the base, but otherwise just smoldering away for quite a time.

But even better, if one already has an established Osage Orange bush/tree, a LOT of wood can be cut and the bush/tree is almost impossible to kill.  In fact, the house I grew up in had a drainage pipe that ran under a road to a low portion of the empty lot in front of the house near the far side of the lot.  The pipe terminated near an Osage bush and it was perpetually threatening to send its roots up the pipe and clog it.  Therefore my parents engaged in a nearly unlimited attempt to cut back and kill the Osage bush, only to have it grow back.  Sometime it would be cut right to the ground, only for it to grow back and be 8' or so tall in as little as 3 years.  One of my neighbors who had to mow around the tree tried to at least cut back some of the offending branches (the 3" thorns are wickedly sharp!).  He would get out a chainsaw and completely dull a chain cutting of all of the growth from a 6" diameter limb.  The growth grew back at a rate of 3' per year!  It was unbelievable--you could practically watch it grow back!  Of course it occurred to me at the time that one could really use that bush plus a few others to really heat a house with a wood stove (I would not heard of a RMH for years to come).  Knowing what I do now, paired with a RMH, I would think that just a few Osage bushes perhaps 8' tall and about the same diameter would give all the heat one would need for a decent sized house even for a long, cold winter.

Osage can be amazing!

Eric

I haven't looked to see if this has been shared anywhere on this site already but this article by the always awesome Eliza Greenman is an excellent resource on the traditional method of growing an animal proof osage hedge. https://elizapples.com/2024/03/15/the-traditional-osage-orange-hedge/ . I don't have a space to play with this now but I'd like to try at least on a small scale in the future.

I've been harvesting osage fruits from a tree that produces the smallest of any I've found. Not sure if this is a rare trait or not but the fruits are only the size of a black walnut in the hull. Almost all the others I've seen have been grapefruit sized or a little larger. Have yall seen them this small, and does that seem a desirable trait to propagate?

if the seeds are still viable, it’s at least not an undesirable trait.

they're viable for sure. I've got maybe 200-300 seedlings grown in an air prune bed this season that were sourced from that tree. Got plenty of other tree varieties too, but I'm just getting started with tree nursery stuff so I have no experience in shipping trees.

can you talk about any processing that you did to get from fruits to seedlings? just separating out seeds and planting, or how much more to it is there?

I just left the fruits outside in a bucket with water over the winter. At some point I took a paint mixer drill attachment and blended it into pulp. Then successively poured off the top, added water and poured off again. The good seed will sink to the bottom of the bucket and the junk will float or stay in suspension long enough to pour off. Repeat until seeds are as clean as you want. I would store seed in a bag or container with something like sand or sawdust (I usually use punk from rotting logs) to keep some moisture in. I've started putting some old cinnamon powder in the mix to curb mold growth, mostly just in case. I don't recall if I actually stored seed or planted straight away, my notes say I didn't seed the osage until mid-March, but that was probably just when I got around to it. Again, this was in an air prune bed, and pretty densely seeded. I believe I scattered seed on the surface then topped off with some finely shredded half composted wood chips. They grew 12-18", but I hung some shade cloth over them that was really for trees in adjacent beds. I would have liked to have moved the osage out but it was too heavy to move at that point. Might have slowed their growth a bit. This is them now, almost dormant:

Eric Hanson wrote:...fence posts that looked TERRIBLE upon first glance... they had been in place for likely decades.  Those same fence posts are sitting there, completely unchanged 50 years later!  Osage is amazingly durable wood.

Dad cut a mess of hedge posts back when I was too little to help much. I mostly watched my little sister, I did help stack brush, a little. I'll be 50 next summer. I have my eye on one of those posts that may need replacing in 5-10 years. (One or two failed within the first few years as well.) The rest seem like they could have 30-50 years left.

greg mosser wrote:can you talk about any processing that you did to get from fruits to seedlings? just separating out seeds and planting, or how much more to it is there?

What I read (and it worked for me) is to put a bunch in a bucket of water and leave them to soften until you can use a sledgehammer like a pestle to mash them into a paste. I think the guy that said that left them all winter, but I got inpatient and went at mine after 3 weeks to a month. His were probably easier to mash, but I got 'em bashed up. He made a little trench like a row in the garden and poured that in. I poured mine over a poorly built air-prune box. Some kind of rodent liked my seeds, I finally had to put a cage over top, but I still got a box full.