Starting Firewood for the kids, need advice

[pen]

ewdudley was nice enough to bring some osage orange fruit into my area over the holidays for me to play with and I seem to have been successful in getting them started. In fact, I think every damn seed I put into the dirt took! I certainly wasn't expecting more than 1 or 2 per pot to take off.

With that said....my question for those w/ more experience than me is, what do you folks suggest I do with these now? Think I should start to carefully separate them out and plant into individual pots now or do you think I should wait a while yet? Any suggestions on how large a pot I should go to next or should I go straight outside w/ some sort of protection?

Most all seem to have moved past their seed leaves and are really surprising me w/ their growth rate. In general any advice on what do do from here would be great.

Thanks all.

pen

 

[tfdchief]

Pen, I have never done anything but cut them down and burn them, but from that, I can tell you they are indestructible......Cut a hedge tree down to the ground and it will grow new hedge trees from the stump!

 

[pen]

Thanks Chief. I hope that means I at least have a sporting chance here.

I may have a greenhouse to use, but my thumb is a very pale shade of green.

pen

 

[tfdchief]

Well, I have a degree in Botany and I can't grow grass , so don't feel bad. Really, I think you could throw the pot contents out on the ground and the dang things would grow. Good luck.

 

[Wood Duck]

If you want to do this the easy way, then keep them in the pots as shown in the pictures until may. Then, when it is safe to plant tomatoes, plant them individually into the ground in the spot you want them to grow permanently. If you want to put more work into it but get slightly better growth rate and higher chance of success with each one, then transplant them to individual pots now, keep them in the individual pots until they show new growth and a few weeks longer than that, then transplant to the ground not later than early summer. in individual pots each one will have more room to grow, and in June you will probably see a big difference between the two methods. Within a year or two there probably won't be any difference.

 

[pen]

Thanks for the advice duck.

I think I have enough there that I can play around w/ both methods.

Where I live, deer are a bit overabundant and generally love to eat up small stuff like this (not to mention the other critters). Think there is anything I can or should do to protect them from animals and give them a better shot at life?

I see trees started like this all over my area because of the negative wildlife interaction young trees experience.

I really don't want to put each in a tube, but maybe that's the only way to give a high chance of success in certain areas? Maybe there are other methods that are less costly that may help?

pen

 

[ScotO]

Pen, that's a great tribute! I want to transplant some of the thousands of ash seedlings we have growing in the back of my woodpile, and also a handful of sugar maple seedlings sometime this summer. I may have to work out a trade with you on some of your seedlings when they get a little bigger. I would love to start some osage orange here on the farm.....

 

[Wood Duck]

Probably the easiest way to start Osage Orange is by planting the seeds directly where you want the trees. There are some places near here with osage orange hedges where a guy could pick up a ton of fruit this fall and plant a lot of hedge with it. Scotty, I can give you directions to a big hedge near my place that drops 100 osage oranges on a public road every November. You can pick up all the free seed you want; the 400 pounds of sticky rind that you'll get with the seeds is a bonus.

 

[woodsmaster]

The old timers would dig a shallow ditch, crush the fruit up and put a little in the ditch. this is how they made the fence rows and the cattle wouldn't be able to go threw the hedge once it grew up . At least this is what I was told I wasn't there.So if you want to plant more in the future this would be an easy way to plant rows. Then you would just thin it down to what you wanted.