It was believed that by placing mothballs near a mouse nest you will get rid of your rodent problem. The amount of naphthalene found in mothballs is a small. The levels of naphthalene needed to repel mice are the same needed for humans. Hedge apples are generally not considered edible. The juice inside the fruit and stem is a skin irritant. They do however make an interesting addition to home decor.
Mice leave smearing, greasy marks along skirting boards and around holes. Squeaking and scraping sounds that stop when you make a noise. Scatter flour on surfaces overnight so you can see their footprints.
I mix up a spray bottle with half vinegar, half water, and a few drops of Peppermint essential oil. I use this mixture as a cleaning spray to clean the kitchen walls, cabinets , and floor. I use this spray for everyday kitchen cleanup. Hedge apples are not poisonous to any animal, including dogs and cats. Some livestock have reportedly died while eating hedge apples because the fruit becomes lodged in their throats, causing suffocation. A hedge apple , placed one in each room will deter roaches for up to two months.
Dust mites, while microscopic, are truly everywhere in your living quarters. Deer will eat these, but usually as a last food resort in late winter with snow on the ground.
Peppermint oil can be an effective mouse deterrent, but it is not an effective way to remove mice that are already living in your home. If the scent is strong enough, it will prevent them from making a new home in the area where you place the cotton balls. Scientific studies have found that extracts of Osage orange repel several insect species, in some studies just as well as the widely-used synthetic insecticide DEET.
The latex secretion, too, is not just sticky like industrial glue. It is also a skin irritant. When fruit is said to have a woody pulp, it means that it is not as tender as mango or orange when you bite into it. The fruit tastes bad. The role of the hedge apple in the planet is more of as fencing and a barrier rather than a food item.
Its ability to tolerate unhealthy soil, extreme heat, and strong winds make it a good windbreaker and a hedge around the house. The worst-case scenario is you will have many rotting hedge apples on your lawn which will emit a bad smell. But, you still have to slice through the cardboard-tough exterior, soak it for 24 hours, wash with water to remove the skin-irritating liquid, and fry it. She continued her gardening education by working on organic farms in both rural and urban settings.
She started UrbanOrganicYield. In fact, as foodstuff for both humans as well as animals, hedge apples are unpalatable and practically useless. So, eating hedge apples is pretty much out of the question. Still, these fruits grow all over the area, so you might well wonder if they can be used for something else.
If you live in the Ozarks region, you may have indeed seen people trying to use hedge apples for entirely different purposes, namely as a pest control measure. This is an old home remedy that has persisted in the region for some time. Still, is there any validity to it? If the innards produce a juice that can cause eczema in humans, that hardly sounds like the sort of thing that is good for bugs and insects either. For some families in the region, that reasoning is good enough.
They have been used either whole or sliced, and on their own or in conjunction along with lemon and chestnuts. Hedge apples are most commonly used in this way to repel spiders, and are placed along with any lemons and chestnuts in the basement. The only problem with this theory is that there is no scientific evidence to back it up.
It is true that, in limited cases, chestnuts paired with peppermint oil were somewhat effective at repelling a couple types of spiders. Even so, however, researchers at Iowa State University have found hedge apples along with lemons to be completely useless in repelling spiders. The best that can be said about hedge apples in terms of their pest repelling powers is that those same researchers found that some compounds within the fruit are able to repel cockroaches.
That said, left intact, a whole hedge apple was nowhere near as effective. Is there anything that hedge apples are actually good for besides being unique balls of curiosity which, upon further examination, only become more and more distasteful, literally and figuratively?
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