Gentlemen,
My parents have a property in Australia and as they have got a bit older, they have leased the place out to a neighbor to run his cattle on for grazing and for baling hay and making silage. On the tilled areas the land has remained in good condition but in those areas left for grazing alone, there onle Honey locust has run rampant. We have had a problem with them for years but now they have really spread. When I head home to OZ, most of my holiday time is spent dealing with these bloody things and I have had a bit of experience dispatching them back to the **** they came from.
1. Use proper safety equipment, wear long sleaves, good thick leather gloves and absolutely wear eye protection. Have some anti-inflamatory / topical anaesthetic cream on hand too. You will know why when you need to use it.
2. Try and get them before the fruit (black pods) have set. That is how these things propagate, and birds and cattle love them and will deposit the seeds all across the paddock as they are not digested. So before you fell the tree, make the effort to pick up as many that may already be on the ground, bag them and properly burn them.
3. Leave the tractor in the shed unless you have highly pucture resistant tires. My weapon of choice is something with tracks and a blade but a D9 would be a bit over the top. (many of our trees are mature).
4. If you have to pull it over, make sure your chain is long. You absolutely do not want these mongrels coming through your tractor cab.
5. poison the stumps with glyphosate or some other broad spectrum herbicide if you are going to leave them there, otherwise rip them out of the ground.
6. be careful of those around you once chopping the felled tree as those thorns can go flying some distance if grabbed by the chain of your saw.
7. Get into it, but be aware that these thorns actually hurn more than they look and the do look ferocious. The swelling and pain is immense from even just a small injury.
8. For the small stuff, poision the foliage, come back a couple of weeks later and rip them out.
9. Make sure your neighbors do the same thing. Those seeds from the black pods spread easily via birds and cattle, they are relatively fast growing so you need to do the job thoroughly and over a broad area.
Hope it helps. Be careful. These are a bloody awful species that can really get out of control and they just become exponentially harder to remove over time.
Bill
