Black Locust

[WV Sawmiller]

   I'd heard Honey Locust was a type of Accacia tree. I know it looks similar to the Accacia trees I saw in Africa and other countries. I know Accacia thorns are tough and will puncture car tires. Our guide in southern Africa (Namibia, Botswana and S. Africa even warned us not to ever drive over a pile of elephant dung because they love to eat accacia and the intact thorns will actually pass through their digestive system and still puncture a tire. I know deer love the beans off honey locust trees and it has a chocolate smell.

[Rebarb]

Black locust is outstanding firewood, slightly behind hedge but nobody will know the difference and much easier to find.
Oak is everyone's favorite here in east but give me locust , hedge and shagbark. Lol

[Jemclimber]

Howard,

A few facts for trivia: Honeylocust *one word* is not related to Black locust.

Honeylocust - Gleditsia triacanthos has many cultivars that have no thorns, that are often sold for yards in nurseries.

Black locust - Robinia psuedoacacia  has no cultivars that I'm aware of.  We'll have to ask WDH.     'psuedo'= 'false'-acacia.

Going to Africa must have been a wonderful experience.  Did you bring back any wood?

[WV Sawmiller]

Jemsclimber,

  I am aware they are two distinctly different species and saw where Honeylocust (one word) has thornless varieties. All I have seen around here has thorns and is very crooked and gnarly.

  I recently did a demo for our local USDA workshop and in one of the pre-meetings the forestry team was talking about various programs they had going on and I heard them mention some discussions or experiments going on to plant black locust for fence posts and such. I don't know how far along that has gotten with that but it looks feasible to me.

  I spent several years working in west Africa (Cameroon and Guinea) and we vacationed in central, east and south Africa and I loved it. I have a house full of memories from there including mortars & pestles, pygmy crossbows and hunting nets, baskets, carvings, drums, boat paddles, cloth, hats, spears, etc. My wife (A free-lance photographer) is entering a local photo contest and has been going through many years of our work for pictures to enter and visits there and is twitching to go back.

[wisconsitom]

Up here, black locust is easily able to become a full-sized tree.  No die-back at a young age...they just keep growing and root-suckering all over creation.  If I  lived in Missouri....or maybe even Southerner Wisconsin, I'd be okay with having them around, along with all the other southern woodland species-oaks and hickories and black walnuts.  But up in God's country...no way....keep that junk out of there!  Nothing I hate more than seeing a copse of BL along a northern WI roadside hill-cut somewhere, proliferating like mad, getting ready to sucker into adjacent forest lands.

It is not helpful to most natural systems to goose them with nitrogen.  Forests are adapted to constant, but exceedingly low inputs of nutrients from the decomposition and resultant recycling of nutrients on the forest floor.  These systems are damaged by large nitrogen inputs.

tom

[Al_Smith]

About the only thing better than black locust for fence posts would be osage orange /hedge apple which is also good firewood . I've been told the pins for post and beam old dairy barns were green cut black locust .Good heavens some of those things were huge from days of old and huge oak trees .

[wisconsitom]

Hey Al.  In this part of the country, white-cedar has always been the fence post and pole of choice. Tamarack gets used similarly.  Nearly all old barns in Wisconsin feature tamarack rafters, purlins, and beams.

tom

[Al_Smith]

That stuff doesn't grow here .However believe it or not they planted catalpa in groves in places like to corners of field .near a creek etc .Planted close the grew straight up .Never ending supply of fence posts .Most of those groves along with the big dairy barns are all gone now .The black locust still are though .They must propagate by the roots like a quaking aspen .I pushed a bunch of them out with a bulldozer and they seemed to be one big root system .

[wisconsitom]

Yes Al, a root-suckering or rhizomatous species-black locust.

I was just recently wondering where catalpa ever got used for anything!  Interesting.

tom

[doc henderson]

we still have a ton of catalpa in groves here.  Planted with the aid of county extensions reportedly for ties.  splits easy, smell nice to burn, does not burn long.  strait as a tele pole.

[Don P]

It must smell different burning than felling ???, that is not what I call a pleasant smell.

I had to move some wood around in the barn today and moved some black locust lumber I had stashed up there. Not high grade at all but there are nice smaller pieces to be gotten out of the boards. That got me to thinking of what to do with it. I've called black locust "the American teak" before so just did a round of looking at teak patio furniture images, that looks like a good fit for what the tree produces. Another would be narrow strip flooring but I don't have a need.

[wisconsitom]

Northern catalpa is being used as a street tree up here, to pretty good effect, I think.  Municipal foresters have always had to be careful about what type of seed pod, nut, or capsule rains down from a given tree idea.  So far, the catalpa "bean pods" are being tolerated by the public.  I like seeing the tree used this way about as far north as Green Bay.  Anywhere beyond that, it doesn't belong, in my view.  Not a true northern "mixed-wood" species.

I have never seen a wild northern catalpa, so far as I am aware.

tom

[doc henderson]

don, all the trees that I got, had been pushed over years earlier with a bulldozer to clear for a house.  we used it to have something for our wood stove when we first moved here and did not have contacts with land, other than this.  it smells like a pipe smoke in the distance.  i suppose that is open for interpretation.  Not everyone like the smell of pipe smoke.  

[Old Greenhorn]

Not everyone like the smell of pipe smoke.  

I like the smell of pipe smoke, reminds me of Dad.

[doc henderson]

God Bless OG.  good to remember!  It planes out nice as well.  My wife and I went to get our first load together so we could use our wood stove 20 years ago.  we cut and loaded in a pick up.  Went back with my cousin and my old ford state dump truck, and we loaded full trees by hand in the back of the truck.  The land owner wanted to get rid of the piles of trees.  she was the daughter of a nurse I worked with, and she called her mom in amazement that we were picking up whole trees and loading them by hand.  They were "goot and dry"! (my best german accent).  That family was "retired" Mennonite.  We had moved from Fort Hays, Ks where most were descendants of Volga German migrants.  They all had a great accent and put the word "once" in every sentence.