Natural Wonders -Hedgeapples

The land produced vegetation:  plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.  And Elohim saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:12

Long, long ago, when children were still allowed, no, made, to walk home from school, my friends and I saw what looked like a round, green brain lying on the sidewalk.  It was very hard, about the size of a softball and smelled like a lime.  Since computers, cell phones, and iPods hadn’t been invented yet, we did what most children would have done at that time – we kicked it down the sidewalk until we tired of the game and left it to rot on someone’s front yard.  Had I known then that it was a hedgeapple, comes from the Osage Orange tree, and is a natural insecticide…I probably still would have used it for a soccer ball.

Named after a regional Indian tribe, the wood of the Osage Orange tree is hard, heavy, tough, and durable.  A small to medium sized tree, displaying some very formidable thorns, it tolerates poor soils, extreme heat, and strong winds.  It’s no wonder, then, that pioneers in the midwest region of our country planted the trees in rows, or hedges, as a natural fence in which to keep their livestock – hence, the name of the tree’s fruit, “hedgeapple.”   Today we have barbed wire, but wood from the Osage Orange is still used in making strong, sturdy fence posts that are known to outlast the barbed wire attached to them.   Archery bows and furniture are but a few of the many other products made from this prized wood.

It is the fruit of this tree, however, that I search out and gather each year in late September or early October.   With the onset of autumn, spiders, crickets, waterbugs, and a whole host of creepy crawly critters decide to winter over in my house.  They come en masse down the chimney, up the water pipes, under the doors, and through the window screens.  I have found that these “round, green brains,” or hedgeapples, are a natural and effective household insecticide.  I place one in each room and two or three in the basement, out of the reach of children, setting them in coffee filter-lined cereal bowls – they do ooze sticky stuff which is a known skin irritant.   A day or so later finds me vacuuming, sweeping, and wiping up dead bugs everywhere.  The hedgeapples rot away in about a month or two (another reason to use coffee filters), but, by then, we’ve had our first frost and bugs are no longer a problem.  

Of course, there are skeptics who call all of this “folklore,” if they’re being polite, and “baloney,” if they’re not.  I remember one such person, a coach who came from suburbia to work at our rural school.  It had been an especially abundant year, hedgeapple-wise, and I lugged two egg-crates full of them to school to give away.  Teachers, principals, secretaries and janitors all eagerly snapped up as many as they could carry.  Mr. Coach scoffed at our quaint, if not ridiculous, notions, but I convinced him to take a couple home.  A few days later, he called me aside and, with an incredulous whisper, told me that the closet in which he put both hedgeapples was now full of dead bugs!  HeHe.

by: Debbie Reed