Honey Locust Thorns

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Uncle Meat

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Winter decorating and craft projects?
Maybe for the Adams family.
Have a lot of them on one place. Since the limbs are low growing, I take the tractor with front loader and lift up the limbs while putting forward pressure on the trunk and then cut with the saw sometimes on the knees. Treat the stump with Tordon RTU.
Thanks for the tip.
 

Dale00

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Formidable thorns....made me wonder why the trees developed them. Mastodons or giant sloths perhaps. Oklahoma used to be a radically different place.....once upon a time long ago

The heavily-armed honey locust trunks, with their woody thorns up to 40 cm long, have led to speculation why there should be so much investment in protection, when the herbivores that might find the tree appetizing today are not deterred by them. One suggestion is that honey locust evolved in an environment where browsing herbivores larger than deer were common. Large mammals (megafauna) roamed the Americas for twenty million years but approximately twelve millennia ago, at the close of the Pleistocene, they went extinct. The well-armed trunks and branches may have evolved as protection against browsing megafauna and the thorns we see today are merely remnants of a once important evolutionary strategy.
https://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/plants400/profiles/GH/Gleditsia
 

SoonerP226

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I haven't dealt with honey locust, but I have some black locust on my place. The saplings have thorns just like roses, which is usually how I figure out the sapling I just grabbed is one. Those things are worse than briars...
 

p238shooter

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I have one of those trees on my property. Need to get rid of it, have gotten a couple flats on my mower from it. I saw the link to buy them but can't find any information of what you would want to use those thorns for.

OP, Hope your wound heals quickly.
 

Pokem807

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I decided to forego the booze, but some aspirin and sleep seem to have helped quite a bit. Most of the pain is gone and range of motion is almost normal. The weird thing is that when I straighten my arm out it feels like the elbow is going to hyper-extend.

I've always been impressed by how large those thorns are, but now I have a little more respect for them as well. I'm going to leave a few of the trees back there, because they really bring in the deer.
 

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