Best way to remove Bodark

[missa]

I am cleaning up some land for my horses but it has Bodark trees all over it. What is the best way to remove them? Also there is baling wire everywhere. What in the world can be done with 55 gal drums full of it?

[Diamond_Y]

Depending on the size, someone might want to come cut the Bois D Arc trees, they make outstanding fence posts since they will last for decades without rotting.

Alot of the old houses here are on foundations made of Bois D Arc stumps.

[Range]

"Get rid of them..." LOL!! Good luck!

Someone may want to cut them, as DY said. If you want to cut them, be sure you have a sharp chainsaw blade and a lot of patience. They are HARD wood.

They do make excellent fence posts.

[Sirita_88]

What in the world kind of tree is that??

[Whitehorse]

I'm not familiar with the Bodark trees. Are they poisonous to horses? As far as your baling wire ... do you have a local trash dump near you that you can take them to? Probably would be inexpensive to take them to the dump.

[Diamond_Y]

Bois D Arc trees are called Osage Orange in other parts of the country.

[Whitehorse]

I found some more info on these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osage-orange

Osage-orange, Horse-apple or Bois D'Arc (Maclura pomifera) is dioeceous plant species, with male and female flowers on different plants.
Native to the rich bottom lands of Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma.[3] The plant is native to an area in the central United States consisting of parts of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, southeastern Oklahoma, Tennessee, a narrow belt in eastern Texas, and the extreme northwest corner of Louisiana, but was not common anywhere.
The fruit has a pleasant and mild odor, but is inedible for the most part. Although not strongly poisonous, eating it may cause vomiting. The fruit is sometimes torn apart by squirrels to get at the seeds, but few other native animals make use of it as a food source.
The Osage-orange is commonly used as a tree row windbreak in prairie states, which gives it one of its colloquial names, "hedge apple".

Interesting ... the fruit in the pictures looks edible, but they are not. I guess they would be poisonous to horses if they ate one.

[Diamond_Y]

I'd be very surprised if a horse ate one. We have them all over this area and I've never seen a horse even smell one. The fruit is also supposed to be a bug repellant.

[Paminky]

Hedge-apple trees are everywhere here in Kentucky but that article doesn't list it. Even the fence rows on the Interstate are full of them.

The joke around here is to call somebody a hedgeapple if they're pretty much useless... like a hedgeapple.

[Sirita_88]

oh okay! We have those through the trails, we call them horse apple trees. Of course our horses don't eat them lol.

[Paminky]

I always thought horse apples are those round green things you muck out of the stalls every morning and evening.

[recklesshoundog]

You can take the 55 gal drums full of wire to a steel scrap yard....you might even end up with a few pennies!

[beth55051]

Originally Posted by recklesshoundog

You can take the 55 gal drums full of wire to a steel scrap yard....you might even end up with a few pennies!

That's what I was going to say. That's what we did with all the old barbed wire we found on our place along with all of the bigger pieces of scrap steel.