Just a Few Tidbits This Morning

These plants I remember distinctly while working on the ranch. They’ve been in Florida about 20 years now, and were first discovered in Florida in Glades County. If you’re involved in the cattle industry here in Florida, you know the soda apple, or have known the soda apple first hand. When you talk about an invasive species of plants, this has to be in the list. These plants will absolutely take over your pastureland, if nothing were done to stop it. Back when I was working on the ranch in Kenansville, this is where we had our first contact with this plant, and has since spread to the other two places. We first started noticing it heavy, in one pasture particularly, and it spread from there. I’m guessing this one pasture was probably 50-60 acres, and good grass. It seemed like in no time at all, this plant had almost completely taken over the entire pasture. Seriously, this soda apple plant seems to grow leaps and bounds daily. First off this was probably around 1991-92, and it had been in Florida, but hadn’t really gotten to our area heavily. The ranches are in Osceola County, which abut to Polk, where Deb and I live. The problem we first faced was basically no knowledge of how to combat this plant. We have always been on a mowing program, where when we’d move the cows in the summer to other pastures, we’d drag the pastures busting up the manure (cheap fertilize), then mow it. Not knowing we were hurting more than helping. We did this by thinking our mow programs would help our problem. BUT, we were actually spreading the plant even more, because we were mowing the soda apple AFTER the fruit was on the plant. So when we mowed, we were literally broadcasting the seeds over the entire place! The fruit I’m speaking off, is a round shaped seed pod, and looks almost exactly like a little watermelon, little dark stripes, against a color background almost identical to a watermelon. These fruits, or seed pods, are just absolutely LOADED with seed, and man, we had gone into the farmin end of soda apples and didn’t even realize it! More...