[AT] Honey locust

[Indiana Robinson]

When my parents bought this farm in 1951 they were buying about half of a
220 acre farm. They had to find a farm quickly with short notice and simply
could not swing the whole thing. A great uncle owned a busy factory about
40 miles south of here and my mother wrote him asking if he knew of anyone
that was looking for a farm to keep as an investment to buy the other half
and lease it back to us. As it turned out he did. The owner of a mid-sized
tool and die business in Indy that he had gotten to know. Short version, it
all worked out. We had 220 acres to farm and he eventually built a house
and moved to the farm. My son now owns and lives in that house... (There is
a long story there)  :-)
This farm had been owned by a local banker for many years then later by a
long time Ford dealer and his brother as an investment. The poor farm had
suffered many years of often changing tenant farmers, all of which had been
very backward farmers, just farming the high spots. There was one 20 acre
field that they had quit farming because it was "worn out". Yeah, that
backward. The fence rows were all grown up about 30' wide largely with
Honey Locust. There were gullies in every field, many as deep as a cow. One
20 acre field just north of the house we had to farm in 3 sections. All
fields were badly gullied. There were several lanes that you could not even
walk down due to the Honey Locust growth. There were 2 permanent pastures
that were so over grown that big areas could not be walked through. We had
lived here for about 6 months when my folks found the foundation of an old
barn and a wooden silo that had fallen over on its side, all of which was
too overgrown to be seen. Someone had cut some mature trees in the past and
each was a big circle of HL trees with trunks from 2" to 12". The old
stumps had been 24" trees. It took many many years and unbelievable amounts
of labor (much of it mine) to make this farm into what it is today.
We didn't have a lot of chemical choices in the early 1950's. I shudder to
think of how many hundreds and hundreds of gallons of mixed 2-4-D, 2-4-5-T
and stove oil I sprayed on brush with hand sprayers starting when I was
about 11 years old. Veterans in particular might recognize that mix... Also
about that age I started hanging onto one end of a crosscut saw. My father
had two heavily used expression I heard a lot. I never really did
understand the first one. "Get your ass behind you!"... Usually said in
gruff annoyance. The second used when sawing was "I don't care if you don't
pull on the saw just don't drag your feet!"...
Today my father is spinning in his grave because I am planting Honey Locust
trees.  :-)  Not to fear, these are thorn-less and don't seem prone to put
up sprouts. Nice sturdy tree, easily shaped with a little pruning, tiny
leaves and the pods fall over a very short time and are easy to clean up
around the house.
Linking this to old tractors... in the early years we had an abundance of
flats. Those big old thorns had a bad habit of working on into a tube even
little short pieces of them. We formed a pattern of coming in most evenings
and parking the tractors we had been using at the gas tanks and filled
them, checked the lube levels and greased them and planning the next day
all at the same time. One daily habit after we did the rest was to take out
pocket knives and pliers and start picking HL thorns out of the tractor
tires.

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Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com
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