I might have found something I love more than mossballs. (yeah, yeah, I read the posts, moss balls are so done- but I still love them 😉 Anyway, my client, Sandy, gave me some little green balls from the farmer’s market, saying they would keep crickets out of the house, and they’re so beautiful to me!
And they smell so good too. Sandy had a plastic bag filled with them from the farmer’s market and she had planned to place them around her basement to scare the crickets away. She left them in the bag a day or so and before she even had the chance to place the balls around the room, the crickets had left!
Sandy emailed me letting me know they’re called osage oranges, so I did a little reserach. (And by “did a little research” I mean I googled ‘osage orange.’) According to wikipedia, they grow on trees and are not actually closely related to citus fruit but are actually in the mulberry family, called “Moraceae.”
And how crazy is this: “Recent research suggests that elemol, another component extractable from the fruit, shows promise as a mosquito repellent with similar activity to DEET in contact and residual repellency.” So not only are they beautiful & they smell good, but they really do keep bugs away! I’m going to have to try to put some in the boys’ playhouse shed because spiders looooove it. (Last Fall, we had an insane spider crickets invasion in our basement when Eddie & Jaithan came to visit, so the first thing Jaithan asked me before they visited this Fall was, “Are they gone??” hahha)
The wikipedia article goes on to say, “The fruit has a pleasant and mild odor, but is inedible for the most part. Although it is not strongly poisonous, eating it may cause vomiting. However, the seeds of the fruit are edible.” hmm… so there goes the answer to my question of ‘what do they taste like?’ I’ll never know.
It’s interesting that most native animals don’t use it as a food source because typically seeds are dispersed by animals. “One recent theory is that the Osage-orange fruit was eaten by a giant sloth that became extinct shortly after the first human settlement of North America. Other extinct animals, such as the mammoth, may have fed on the fruit and aided in seed dispersal. An equine species that went extinct at the same time also has been suggested as the plant’s original dispersal agent because modern horses and other livestock will sometimes eat the fruit.”
