I find 2.5 is best. It coals really well, almost too much. So I mix it with ash. The thorns on the inside are usually soft from the moisture but as it seasons when exposed they harden up. I've been getting a lot of Thornless variety lately. They have about 50-50 shot of going g wild ( get a light coat of thorns) around 25 years. I think there 6 varieties of thornless. Idk if they all go wild though
The bark of the OP's pics looks nothing like any honey locust I've ever seen....and I have A LOT. Honey locust bark splits and curls. Another poster mentioned Hawthorne and I agree.
Looking forward to seeing what the conclusion is on this one. Learned quite a bit just from reading through the posts already. Oldman47 nice woodlot you have with all the ash. Looks very well maintained T2 Tappin'
Some of the thornless varieties look like that. Almost like a 20-25 year old silver maple bark. They have a tendency to go wild and get a thin, spread out coating of thorns. I'd like to see a split. Also if any suckers are coming up around it. I've seen honey locust look like his pics and with curled ridges and the bark is almost black. Those tend to be 100 % wild and woods trees especially in high water areas. They are know to naturally hybrid with water locust which a lot of people confuse with HL. WL does get the curl on the bark. There's a lot in western ohio
My parents have got a honeylocust at the end of their driveway and a certain someone trimmed it while still living at home and took a thorn through the knuckle on his left hand and now has a big lump of cartilage scar tissue there. Funny thing is the other side of the road has an old fence line of the thornless variety, 100 footers some of them I've cut some of that and it's got a real red tint to the wood. I'm thinking on planting some of the thornless variety here this spring (probably going to mix in black locust as well, the short thrones cousin) it's a tree that the villages and cities use to plant near the street edges too grows fast and is very resistant to road salt.
The bark looks wrong to me from what I've seen online as well - but I've never processed one so I thought I'd better ask those who have.. A little internet knowledge without fact checking can be dangerous. I will see what else I can find on the tree to help with identification. There won't be any splits though unless nature knocks it over - we have grown pretty fond of it in its vertical form. I also don't want to find out what else might be wrapped up in it with the barbed wire!
Could be one of the hybird honey locust developed for landscaping such as sunburst locust. The hybrids don't usually have thorns or seed pods. However, a few stray thorns are not unheard of. The sunburst comes out in a kind of bright yellow in early spring then goes to green. If you have one in your yard you would know it. Hard to believe, but the honey and black locust are not related in any way.
I've found that unless its in the middle of a woods, you cannot just go by bark with Honey Locust. I cut one last month and the bark looks like Black Cherry. There are so many cultivars of it for landscaping and city tree lawn it not unheard of for them to hybridize with one another* *Most cultivars of HL are supposed to be "infertile" meaning they do not produce pea pods as a by product of getting rid of the thorns. Also because some areas consider it invasive due to the roots sending off suckers, so it is a desirous trait to not reproduce. That being said the cultivars shouldn't hybridize with each other or wild ones. But as I've said in other posts cultivars of HL, around the 20-25 year mark, have been known to start producing pea pods, get thorns, and reproduce. I call it going "wild". Splits at times cannot help ID either as some of the cultivars will have white/light cream colored heart wood, unlike wild HL which is a dark heart wood. Look for pea pods, HL will have long, sometimes curly ones. Water Locust will have short wide ones that only typically have one seed. HL and WL are known to hybridize too. I think I have mentioned that already in a previous post though. If you guys can't tell, I really like HL.
I couldn't post descriptions without messing up the picture files. I'm sorry I'm not computer inclined. The first pic is all honey locust, The back ground is 2 year cut stuff, the foreground is a few months old now. Freshly split the day of the pic The 2nd pic is a different angle of the same stack but the foreground is Norway Maple closest to the camera and on the outside is Mulberry 3rd pic is the outside of the stack so you can see the mulberry running into the 2year old HL 4th pic is Black cherry with a few round of Rock Elm mixed in. The dark stuff to the top is mostly Cherry too, the ends just got muddy and wet as they sat for awhile before I could split them. 5th pic is the other side of the Cherry stack but its all Black Locust. ETA: it was supposed to just show you guys the honey locust but I got carried away because I love the BTU's
Got a couple more pics to share.. I tried to capture the shape of the tree, the trunk, and some sprouts on a limb that look like what comes out of a willow. These growths look like they started as thorns, if that makes sense. Also there are some leaves hanging on, and I got a close-up of one.
I took these while I was in the woods after work today cutting up a fallen tree. This is definitely honey locust. All of the honey locust around here looks like this. The state forester identifies this as honey locust. No hybrids, water locust, etc. This is way up in the hills...all over the place.
That's definitely HL. Now I'm questioning what the OP posted because of his new pictures. The branch structures do not look like any type of HL I've seen. With all the types the branches and leaves don't change much.
Oh yeah, that's the nasty blighter! But those spikes knock right off making it easy to cut and handle. I wish I had a mill I'd love to make some flooring out of it.
