Useful Osage Orange

 I've been collecting the balls dropped from my trees.

Left in buckets over the winter, the fruit renders down into a slurry.

This slurry can eventually be poured into a shallow trench to get new seedlings.

I spotted the original fruit beside the road in town, stopped and grabbed a few.

I originally hoped to use them as posts.

They're kinda slow-growing here in the sand.

The small-diameter trunks are useful at my house.

Here's an axe with a new handle.

Buncha tool handles previously posted last January.

Mulberry makes a faster-growing post.

This mulberry log has been air-curing for a few months, hopefully be light enough to deal with soon.

When I install them fresh, it's a job, they're heavy as anything.

You know, a discussion about above bodark fruit (Maclura pomifera) hardly seems complete without a mention of their extinct seed dispersers.

There was an article written about the trees that remember the mammoths that I found interesting enough to search for more information.

I discovered Connie Barlow's book "Ghosts of Evolution". Which I found to be extremely compelling.

Apparently she's progressed from writing about plants that have lost their animal seed dispersers to attempting to save plants in danger of extinction due to Anthropogenic climate change.

That seems like a neat idea. Extinction is forever. Seems stupid to allow these human-caused extinction events to continue without making some effort to slow down the losses.

End of January 2026

This winter, I've gone through a lot of firewood. Burned most of the oak that I could split with an axe... Needed a handle in the maul before I could work on the elm.

New ironwood handle

This elm isn't easy to split.

8 homemade handles, 4 osage orange, 3 ironwood, and 1 maple.

I am very glad to be south of that ice storm that so much of the country is dealing with.

The hellebore are in flower.

Early daffodil

Ebony spleenwort