Osage Orange/ Carpathian Walnut Germ.

To plant a walnut or any other kind of tree nut, you take a coffee can, drill drainage holes in the top and the bottom, fill with soil mix, stick your walnut in (plant in fall) and bury the can down with a foot of soil above it. Dig it up in late spring, and you should have sprouted baby trees in there. Replant where you want them and give them some protection from weeds and things that might destroy them.

Osage orange trees used to be so common in the past, used as a prickly living livestock fence hedgerow from what I've heard. They were just planted closely together and used as a hedge and not a tree. I only know of two trees in my area now. We used to have a huge one in the woods behind our childhood home, but it died. It is supposed to be the very highest BTUs for firewood too. Maybe that's what happened to them.

Do you use the "oranges" to repel bugs in the home? They say they are very good for that, although I'm not sure how it works.

The only osage orange plants I've seen are full sized trees (full of big round fruits). They are either male or female (if I remember correctly) hence, there are only two trees along the road with fruit, although, several trees look like osage orange without fruit.

When we first built this house -- during the curing of the basement floor -- there were lots of what I called black water bugs (because they were always found in damp spaces). This guys could squeeze through the thinest of places. I tossed several osage oranges into corners and behind things. Within a very short time the black bugs and the "coil" worms were gone.

Was it the Osage fruit? Was it just that the basement had cured enough to be rid of its extra moisture? I don't know. It just seemed that they worked that summer. I never needed them after that one time. If they did work, they did a permanent job on my critters.

As others have mentioned, the trunks make excellent fence posts that will last halfway to forever. There are not, however, a lot of start-up Osage trees in the area so I'm not sure how easy they are to start from seed.

From experience osage oranges did not repel roaches, who gleefully ran over them, even when cut open. I ate a tiny piece of one fruit and it didn't taste too bad and I don't recall any ill effects. I planted a nursery grown one 14 years ago. It was about two feet tall when I got it and it only grew an inch a year until last year when it suddenly put on three more feet. It has yet to produce a fruit. They are also called Horse Apples. In the old days people just dug a trench where they wanted the hedge and dropped them in to let them freeze and thaw over the winter beore back filling in the spring. You could also put them into a plastic bag in the fridge until they are soft and ripe

Wow, thanks everyone!

That link is great @baymule, I'll have to read through the rest of it when I'm not short on time, thanks! Bois de' Arc, Bodark - very interesting. Also didn't know that the wood would be good for bow material @Pulsegleaner, I'm starting to realize that trees are much more useful than I had ever imagined.

Flowerweaver - just drop the whole fruits into a trench and let sit for the entire winter? That sounds very easy.

That's an interesting tidbit of information bobm! I'm mostly going to plant them to have the trees around and am less worried about production at the moment. I will write that down for later use though.

Ridgerunner said:

I didn't know you could eat the seeds of an Osage orange. How do you do that?

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From what I've read the individual seeds have some sort of jelly sack surrounding them (think cucumber seeds) that need to be washed off first. Wash those off, then your supposedly good. Whether they can be eaten raw or you need to cook them first I do not know, but I would think that raw would be fine.

The English Walnuts were already starting to turn brown by the time they got here, so they're probably dried out already or at least getting there. Dad's client had supposedly only planted three trees and got hundreds of small ones from the squirrels. So Thistle I think that being my "inner squirrel would be a fine idea (just don't want to get too far into it or I might end up with broken front teeth and bruises from falling out of a tree). I'll take their green-brown coverings off, soak them in a bucket of water for a while, then start planting!

Just remember to wear gloves while you take the husks off, otherwise you'll stain your hands brown (and the stain stays on your skin for months) Remember, walnut husks used to be used for ink (as well as dye) and that applies to ALL the walnuts, not just the black.

i've known of folks who make jelly out of the bodark fruit but don't have a clue how. and be aware that the thorns on the trees can puncture a tractor tire. let us know if they come up next spring

catjac1975 said:

Those osage oranges are new to me. Cool. What do they taste like?

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Cat old wise tale they keep snakes away !!!!

Speaking of old wives tales, Seed, one little piece of advice. If, in washing off the walnuts you happen to find one or more with 3-4 ridges (those raised parts that where the shells divide. a normal Carpathian has only two) you may want to hold on to those rather than plant them. They sometimes don't grow as well as "normal" two sided ones, and (at least in our family) there has always been a belief that 3-4 sided walnuts are powerful lucky charms (stronger that four leaf clovers).

Nyboy said:

Cat old wise tale they keep snakes away !!!!

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LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE!!!!!!!

"Inner squirrel!"

On that other thread we talked about firewood trees and I mentioned the different species that grow in different locations. I wonder how the neighbor's 2 huge Carpathian walnut trees would be as firewood ...

On the southern Oregon farms where I grew up, we had 2 Carpathian walnuts on one farm and 4 on another! The first "business" I had was cracking walnuts and selling them to the nearest grocery store - this was pre-soopermarkets. Wow! What a job for an 8 year old - but our walnuts were large, plump beauties!!

The neighbor's walnuts here are pathetic, shriveled things. Very close to useless except the squirrels love to move them around in their stained-black mouths and with their evil down-turned grins ...

I don't know why more people don't have hazel nuts here!! Those little trees do just fine and mature nice crops of nuts.

Steve
grumpy after pushing produce boxes out of the way with the back door and 50mph winds overnight . . .