In the fall of last year on the way to church, we noticed a tree along the road with some sort of fruit hanging from it. The fruit was about the size of a grapefruit and was bright green.
I spoke to one of my co-workers about it. Since he had a PhD in forestry, I figured that he would know what it was. He tried to tell me that it was a walnut tree but I assured him that it wasn’t.
Well this fall on our way to church, we kept an eye out for this strange fruit tree. Two Sundays ago, Kathy spotted it and last Sunday, we picked up some fruit off of the road.
Since we were on our way to church anyway, we took the fruit in with us. One guy tried to tell us that it was a crab apple but we dismissed that. Finally, some friends from church told us that it was an Osage Orange.
When we got back from church, we looked it up on line and sure enough, it was an Osage Orange. And according to folk lore, if you put one of these in your house, it will repel spiders and mice.
The fruit itself is not edible but squirrels will often rip it apart for the seeds. The inside of the fruit looks a lot like that of a Kiwi.
I don’t know what we are going to do with the thing now that we have it. The main thing was to identify it.
They now sell these in our grocery stores in fall. They are wonderful for keeping fruit flies away. I just leave it on the counter on a plate and NO fruit flies. This last year I decided to leave it until I saw a fruit fly. It ended up looking rotten and dried up so I hid it in the corner of the counter. That crazy thing keep all the fruit flies away until the beginning of August. It worked for 11 months and I have had some pretty bad bananas at times. This year I am going to buy a couple and keep some in the frig. Hopefully they will last longer without looking so rotten. But it is worth not having fruit flies even if I have this ugly thing hidden in the corner.