Hillbilly Garden Club of Springfield MO

10/16/2026

Mulch isn’t just garden decoration—it completely shapes the world underground.
What you put on top dictates whether your soil thrives or struggles:
🪵 Wood Chips: Excellent moisture retention that feeds beneficial fungi and microbes as it breaks down. Best for trees, shrubs, and perennial beds.
🌾 Straw: Clean, medium moisture retention that keeps soil cool without compacting. Ideal for vegetable gardens and strawberries.
🚫 Black Plastic Sheeting: While it traps moisture, it traps extreme heat, effectively baking beneficial soil life. Avoid using it in living garden beds!
🍂 Shredded Leaves: The unsung garden hero. High moisture retention, free, and the absolute best natural feast for earthworms and soil biology.
🪨 Gravel / Stone: Zero moisture retention and radiates heat, sterilising the immediate surface. Great for drainage pathways and xeriscapes, but not for building plant health.
Feed the soil, and the soil will feed your plants. 🌿
What’s currently covering your garden beds? Share your go-to mulch in the comments! 👇

10/16/2026

10/08/2026

https://ebird.org/news/october-big-day-2026

Mark your calendars for October Big Day—10 Oct 2026! Together, we can make this the first October Big Day with more than a million people united to celebrate birds.

10/08/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EWaXMP3Zy/?mibextid=wwXIfr

A rough green fruit. Wrinkled like a brain. Sitting in a Missouri field in September. Most people know it as the hedge apple.

The Missouri Department of Conservation lists other names too: bois d'arc, bow-wood, bodark.

The tree is not originally from Missouri. MDC says its native range was a small area in western Arkansas, southern Oklahoma and parts of east Texas. In Missouri, the tree was introduced.

French explorers called it bois d'arc, which MDC translates as wood of the bow. That name tells you what it was valued for. MDC calls it the premier bow wood of North America. MDC says Marquette and Joliet found the trees near Osage villages.

Other uses followed. War clubs. Tomahawk handles. Rope from the bark. A light orange dye from the roots and inner bark, which MDC says later colored American World War I uniforms.

Then the tree found its second job.

Before barbed wire, farmers on treeless land needed fences. Osage orange could be planted close together and trained into a living barrier. MDC says a row planted one foot apart could make a fence horse-high, bull-strong and hog-tight within four years.

Kansas planted nearly 40,000 miles of Osage orange hedgerows between 1865 and 1939, MDC says. In the 1860s, seed prices jumped from $8 a bushel to $50.

The wood outlasted the fences. MDC calls it the best native wood for fence posts, with posts installed fifty years ago still working.

The fruit is four to five inches across and ripens in September and October.

The tree can reach 50 feet. The spines are about half an inch long.

And MDC offers one more detail that sounds like folklore. The fruits evolved to be eaten and spread by large herbivores such as mastodons.

Next time you see a line of crooked, thorny trees along a field edge, look closely. It may once have been somebody's fence.

Where have you seen a hedge apple tree?

Illustrated with the use of AI

10/02/2026

Don't miss these awesome events happening tomorrow at the Botanical Center. Shout out to Master Gardeners of Greene County, Springfield, MO for bringing us all this fun!!!