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THE FURROW: The online newsletter of Howell Living History Farm

Prehistoric seeds

11/27/2013

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A friend told me something interesting recently about osage orange, the tree that makes a good hedgerow, the highest BTU firewood in the land (it's so hard it can dull chainsaw blades) and drops softball-sized, brain-like seed pods that aren't eaten by anything and seem to have a dispersal range limited to how far they can roll. And judging by the piles of osage oranges sitting under any given tree, they don't roll very far. 

Native to certain parts of North American, osage orange has been dispersed to the rest of the country by farmers who brought the seeds with them. Pre-farming, however, biologists don't know of any living creature that would have helped disperse these seeds. The leading theory is that osage oranges were eaten and then excreted by a long-extinct pre-historic beast. Which for some reason I think is very interesting to ponder. 
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    The Furrow is the online newsletter of The Friends of Howell Living History Farm. We will be updating this site about once a week with crop reports and other insights into life on a horse-drawn living history farm.

    Howell Farm is owned by Mercer County and operated by the Mercer County Park Commission.

    Funding for the Howell Living History Farm Furrow is made possible in part by an operating grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, a division of the Department of State. 

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