why is blackgum bad?
Blackgum is not.
Sweetgum…one of my least favorite trees. For a variety of reasons.
It is painful to be pelted by those seed pods in a strong wind.
If sweetgums have any redeeming value, please let me know. I don’t have anything but dislike for them, and they are all over our property.
MM
I’ll admit that some sweetgums do have marvelous fall color. The corky wings on branches are interesting.
The spiky seed capsules are torture to barefooted folks. Yes, I’m from Alabama, and no, these shoes don’t hurt my feet. But I do like to walk around my yard barefooted. No sweetgums or chestnuts in my yard!
They throw up honking big above-the-surface roots that wreak havoc on lawnmovers and weak ankles.
If you cut one down and don’t use a good stump-treatment herbicide, get ready for a multi-year fight against the onslaught of root suckers that are gonna be popping up for yards around it. Not much count for firewood - it pops and snaps, sending sparks flying; on larger specimens, the grain is so twisted that I’ve buried wedges up in there and had to burn the log to get 'em out. I dunno… maybe they have a use in the pulpwood industry making paper.
While some will argue that native trees can’t be ‘invasive’, sweetgum comes as close to that classification of anything I can thing of… over 30 years or so, I watched them take up more and more ‘real estate’ in the hardwood and pine forests of east AL. I guess perhaps something uses the leaves or seeds as a food source…but I don’t know what, and it’s unlikely that it’s something I’d care to hunt or eat.
End of plantist rant.
A friend of mine played a trick on me once. He dropped off some logs at my house that I could split for firewood. Most of it was oak but there were a few pieces of wood included that I couldn’t identify until I tried splitting it. After a few wackes and a lot of cursing I called him to tell him he was a $@!@# and he died laughing. Told me it was sweet gum and threw them in with the load to “Make my day”. Haha. I still hold that over his head to this day.
Nice to know that I’m not the only one who despises sweetgums.
speedster,
Only thing worse, IMO, than sweetgum, when it comes to splitting, is elm.
The trick to splitting elm is to cut it and stack it up. Let it set in the stack until it is almost compleatly rotten, then you can kind of break pieces off the sides, lol.
Lol,derby.
That’s funny, I don’t care who you are…
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