mcraddock

I found a bunch of this fruit while out scouting a new area I got permission to hunt this year. It's not common in my area and I have never seen it before. So after a little research, I now know what it is. I thought I would share my discovery with my fellow bowhunters as it has some really neat facts about it.

Sorry if this is common knowledge, but never seen these before.

So tell us what this is and why is it relevant to bowhunting.

HNI_Christine

Hedge-ball, bodarc, osage orange or a few other names.

Good for self bows, fence posts, firewood... I've seen deer hit the 'apples' pretty good after a few hard freezes. In fact the buck I killed last December had a belly full of chewed up hedge apples.
I took some of the seeds from his stomach and am growing the little osage trees now.

MOhunter46

Yep Christine hit the nail on the head. The deer do like em, to bad theres not to many of them around here

mcraddock

Wow! That was fast! Good job HNI_Christine!

I thought it was neat that it's a preferred wood for long bows. But Wiki failed to mention that deer would eat he fruit, it only mentioned squirrels eating them.

These trees I found were aty least 70 years old! Huge !!

HNI_Christine

Here's another thing. Don't hang a treestand under an osage with the fruit still hanging. (This goes for walnut trees too.) Even if you don't get hit by a falling hedge ball, it will scare the snot out of you every time one falls.

bigcountry

All I know is I have about 500 dollars of osage staves. I need to invest in planting this stuff.

Deer generally won't touch the stuff. Seeds are about the only nutricionally value. Squirrels however love em.

bigcountry

And if you plant it in the right spot, you could have this in 15-30 years. My planned hunting bow for the season.

mcraddock

Is this tree fairly common in the midwest? Fence rows?

I didn't see much evidence of the apples being eaten. I did find a bunch of worms or caterpillars in the center of one fruit hat had turned brown. These trees had to have been planted at this farm decades ago. They are on the corners of what is now a defunct barbed wire fence on property lines of a dairy farm. As stated before, I have never seen these where I hunt and fish in South Carolina or Georgia before. So I'm a little curious as to how they got here.

HNI_Christine

They were planted for hedges/fences around here. Fast growing and thorny, if you manage them as they grow you can make an impenetrable living fence.

Don't expect the deer to hit them until after they freeze and thaw a few times. But they do eat them. Even here in corn/bean/acorn country.

bigcountry

Back in the day, farms all over made hedgerows from em. About impossible even for a cow to get thru. More and more farmers are sick of me. They grow out of control and intertaigled. Most have cut em down. Sharp suckers.

I always keep a keen eye out of em to get permission to cut em. Unfortately only about 1 in every 8 trees has good bow wood in it. They like to grow twisted and have tons of pin knots. You let me get too old and they are not great bow wood. About 10" trunk is about as good as it gets.