Sweet gum pods that fall in autumn can also be used as a mulch. Air and water easily pass through their hollow structure, and their spikey surface can even help deter slugs and other animals.
Sweetgum balls can be a nuisance, but the fall color and the overall shade make it worthwhile. If you grow hostas, the sweetgum balls make a great mulch to keep slugs away, and if neighborhood cats use your garden as a litter box, sweetgum mulch keeps them away.
Sweetgum balls can be run through a chipper for mulch, but should not be composted as they take years to decompose.
Decorative: The empty pods from sweetgum trees can be used for decorative purposes. Add these spiky balls to an ornamental bowl, small basket, apothecary jar, or tray. Combine these with other items from nature. Acorns, pine cones, dried orange slices, cinnamon sticks, small white pumpkins, and star anise.
Sweetgum wood is used to make veneer, plywood, cabinets and furniture. The gum from these trees has been used as chewing gum and even employed to concoct medicines and salves to cure a variety of ailments, treat wounds and serve as an important ingredient in adhesives.
They certainly have attractive fall colors, but come with some downsides. Sweet gum roots are highly invasive, often growing near the soil surface and damaging sidewalks, pavements, and other infrastructure. The species also produces prolific hard, round fruits that litter the ground and are often a tripping hazard.
Hardwoods like gum can take up to 18 months.
In addition to this, resins and extracts from sweet gum trees have also shown antibacterial, antifungal, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-ulcerogenic, antihypertensive, anticoagulant, antihepatotoxic and wound-healing benefits. Sweet gum pods that fall in autumn can also be used as a mulch.
I advise folks to rake up the gum balls and toss them into the back of a flower bed or into a compost bin – they decompose and crumble eventually, and provide organic matter for our sandy soils. For what it's worth, some animals don't like walking on sweetgum balls either, nor do slugs like crawling on them.
Prices vary, but you can get as much as $20 for 100 sweet gum balls. Hopefully, this has given you some ideas on how to make a little extra money, easily maintain a clean yard, and put those sweet gum balls to good use.
While the spiky gumballs of Sweetgum trees are notorious for their lawn litter, they don't pose a toxic threat to your canine companions.
Each sweetgum tree annually drops hundreds of round, prickly seed capsules that can be easy to slip on when walking and are difficult to clean up.
Most gumballs have a freshness shelf-life of 18 months from their manufacture date. Gumballs.com has a freshness guarantee on all gumballs and candy. For any processed or manufactured food, the manufacturer is required to indicate a "best by" date or indicate when the product expires.
If you use an organic mulch that will break down, like shredded hardwood bark, avoid landscape fabric because you want the mulch to be in contact with the soil to improve it, Day says. Plastic or landscape fabric could prevent water and rain from reaching the soil, and actually could increase runoff.
Sweetgum isn't an ideal food source for deer, but they'll still eat it as a 3rd choice browse plant.
What to do with them? While not the best looking mulch, they can be used as such. They are said to deter rabbits, slugs and other critters.
While they're not edible, the balls can double as spiky mulch to keep animals away from young plants. You can even get creative and use them to make holiday trinkets or decorative balls for bowls.
In late fall when the bright green seed pods have dried, birds including purple finches, chickadees, Carolina wrens, towhees, titmice, dove and juncos consume the seeds; as do, squirrels and chipmunks. Lastly, if you are not a fan of the Sweetgum balls that litter the ground, consider using them as mulch.
Sweetgum balls will take some time to break down.
The Cherokee and other tribes used the resin to calm nervousness. For this it was taken as an infusion (tea). The Cherokee and Choctaw also combined the resin with strawberrybush to make a beverage of unknown appeal, and the resin, when hardened and sticky, was chewed as a gum.
In addition to the sap, the leaves, bark, and seeds of sweetgum also possess beneficial compounds such as shikimic acid, a precursor to the production of oseltamivir phosphate, the active ingredient in Tamiflu®-an antiviral drug effective against several influenza viruses.
Because of high shrinkage and interlocked grain, gum requires special attention during drying. As a result, it does not have the best reputation in the lumber industry. However, once dried and kept in relatively controlled conditions, the wood like any other is stable.
Only burn seasoned wood (less than 20% moisture). Never burn wet or green wood, household garbage such as plastic or cardboard, painted or treated wood, particleboard or plywood, driftwood, or glossy magazines.
The gumpaste is rolled out thin to make the petals, and then left to harden before assembling into flowers. Most flowers will be dry overnight, but some of the larger flowers (like an English rose) could take up to a week or more to dry. Once gumpaste is dry, it contains no moisture and is shelf-stable.