The Mulberries have also done a bunch of taste tests of different hardy citrus varieties on their YouTube channel.
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A bit more on topic…
So, I’ve never been able to find exact and explicit references stating if other species of Robinia are affected by the locust borer and the fungus it carries. I have seen die-back occur with some bristly locust I planted some years ago but I don’t know if that war borer-related or not as I never found evidence for what caused the die-back.
My suspicion is that most if not all members of Robinia are probably susceptible at least to some degree, but breeding in at least some resistance via hybrids would be a worthy end.
A bit further afield, if someone is feeling particularly ambitious, there is a candidate for inter-generic hybrids of black locust. Olneya tesota, the desert ironwood, is the only member of the Olneya genus, a sister genus of Robinia that’s probably the most similar to Robinia out of the whole Robinaceae tribe. Just by pictures, one could be forgiven for thinking desert ironwood was actually just another species of locust.
The difference of course being, while black locust is quite hard and heavy, desert ironwood is so heavy it sinks in water.
One wonders what a cross between those two would be like, and if it would suffer the same pest issues or be different enough from black locust to either be able to defend itself or fail to even attract the borers in the first place.
Anyway, I’ve posted enough here.
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Here it says that the borer (Megacyllene robiniae) exclusively attacks Black locust and its varieties.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev2_043731.pdf
https://www.pubs.ext.vt.edu/content/dam/pubs_ext_vt_edu/ENTO/ENTO-141/ENTO-141-pdf.pdf
It appears that the borer does not transmit the fungus. Instead, the fungus exploits the borer holes as an entry point for infection. The fungus spores are dispersed by wind.
We don’t have the borer (Balkans) and black locust seems not affected by anything, it grows rapidly and spreads easily, making it nearly impossible to eradicate without the use of total herbicides.
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Interesting, perhaps that’s why they are cooked? I know Cooking destroys saponins in Lambaquaters/Quinoa. Do any other Citrus fruits have saponins too?
Very interesting, is the resin embedded into the juice hence why you have yo wait for it to sift out? Do you still have to wait even if you cook it?
Those are all things I don’t really like, even Lemons are too sour for me. Idk why the trifoliate orange my professor gave me to try wasn’t so bad, maybe I was just chewing on it for a long time, or maybe cuz it was just 1 fruit, I don’t know. Thank you for the valuable info.
Nice! Curious Will other citrus varieties also become hardy if grafted on the Trifoliate Orange?
Well Black Locust I plan to prune back & Keep bushy. I’d plant them in an area I maintain every so often. The Trifoliate is more hands off for a Border/hedge right?
Interesting observation, I never encountered/noticed the Locust Borer or the fungus, perhaps my local trees were lucky or resistant, probably a bit of both. Where does the Locust Borer occur? But if the other species are also susceptible, that’s no bueno. Since Robinia the genus is kind of a Species Complex where all the species hybridize freely in nature where they intersect.
Robinia viscosa looks like an intermediate hybrid between Robinia pseudoacacia x Robinia hispids, bearing not so hot pink flowers & slightly hairy pods.
ha, you’ve read my mind or my notes 
. I was litterally thinking the exact same thing if the Diveristy in Robinia wasn’t enough. I tried to find a phylogenic Tree specifically on the Robinieae Tribe, but all I managed to find were broader phylogenic trees that just happend to have some species.
At least from these Phylogenic Trees, Olneya genus is directly sister to Robinia, both extremely close phylogenically hence why they both look so similar. I wonder if Olneya could actually be a Robinia species but just in a different subgenus, cuz the differences appears to look that way (Maybe once more studies are done & Taxonomy updates).
I think the hybrid would be possible if I mix the pollens of multiple Robinia species & Olneya species than apply that mix to flowers of both genera. Russian Plant Breeder Ivan Michurin was able to do Inter-generic hybrids using this mixing pollen technique he called “Mentor Pollination” & another techinque called “Mentor Grafting”. I bet both genera are at least graft compatible, if so that makes hybridization easier/smoother. Do you think any of the other genera in the Robinaceae tribe next in line to Olneya are also crossable & worth investigating?
PFAF says the Olneya tetosa makes an edible seed that taste like Peanut. Idk why it also says it’s edible raw or cooked? like no bro, the other Robinia species seeds you have to cook to make edible (Forager Samuel Thayer Tried & ate them after cooking), it’s very unlikely it’s edible raw, must be a typo (Especially be that closely related to Robinia & the Fabaceae family being tricky with raw seed edibility (Pisum sativum is the exception). Idk why PFAF didn’t mention the flowers being edible, it feels like that would be the more edible part right? What do you think?
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Perhaps you can share some of your expertise? How do you start your seeds? I have one Black Locust tree that is probably 30+ feet perfectly straight with no limbs as it has spent its life trying to get above the canopy of a large Japanese Walnut. When I bought this old dairy farm 35 years ago there was an old Black Locust, aprox 24" dia trunk, that I ended up having to cut down. For a few years after that I had Locust sprouts coming up everywhere! I probably could have transplanted hundreds of trees had I wanted.
This tree I want to take seeds from is the last of the progeny.
Is there a best time for collection? What do you do for stratification?
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I was going to grow them for fence posts, but the WI DNR told me not to. Since then ive noticed that they are pretty hard on the native forests, and very hard to remove.
I never really “Started” seeds, however I did just trow a bunch of old seed pods on the lawn of my HOA in an open spot, the little seedlings germinated extremly well after winter in May. That’s all my personal experience, but I’ve heard these seeds are hard to germinate. Seeds need cold stratification but the main difficulty is the Hard Seedcoat. People have tried scratching them or using acidic solutions. I just forgot about them which works 
.
wow! the last tree… The best time to collect seeds is from Fully Ripe Seed pods which start to ripen in October here in Maryland (But elsewhere generally in fall when weather gets cooler). However they often remain available to harvest well into winter so you could probably go harvest seeds now (Sometimes they even last into summer from last years pods but those are almost always of poor quality with some kind of problem to explain it).
If you are in no rush, just sow them in a pot outdoors & let winter do the rest. Otherwise, I’d just put them in the fridge like you would when germinating Apple seeds. You could do half & half if you’d like, tell me how it goes as I’m also learning. All I know is the seed pods I droped on the grass in Late Fall Germinated in Spring. It’s very likely your tree may still be dropping seeds for them to be sprouting in spring, if all else fails you may just dig one up in spring like what happend laft time.
Also you may try grafting your tree onto another Black Locust if you need it to be the exact same genetics.
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So a “Native” Tree is hard on “Native” forrests? Maybe that’s where all the hate for this tree comes from? The living fence post would be something to prune every summer to maintain as the tree can go Savage. I’ve also saw Willows can make good living fences as well but I like something thorny deer wouldn’t want to go thru that also provides delicious flowers (As I’d be Pruning for the flowers anyways).
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Black locust is not native to Wisconsin.
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It’s highly subjective what is or isn’t native, but in the bigger picture totally irrelevant.
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Nope, its a fact. Not native to Wisconsin. We also didnt have american chestnuts.
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Regarding native status… In states that were covered by glaciers during the last ice age, you could argue just about any species to be non-native as everything we consider “native” there would have had to colonize as the glaciers receded. Some species recolonize faster than others, but would that mean that we should only count the very first to recolonize as native? As humans we get hung up on how many thousands of years a plant or animal has been in a specific location, but in the grand scheme of things it’s merely a moment of the earth’s history. Ecosystems do not simply come in to being fully formed and perfected. Rather they are in a constant state of flux as species move and/or evolve along with changing climate conditions.
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Thanks, ill try several different methods of stratification and i will let you know.
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I’ve started black locust from seed and found it to be very easy, maybe the easiest tree I’ve ever started. I put the seeds in a cup of very hot (almost but not quite boiling) water and leave to soak overnight then put on a saucer on a damp piece of kitchen towel. Within a few days most of them are sprouting and then I pot them up. The hard part is stopping the slugs eating all the bark of the seedlings!
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Fantastic! I’m glad you had such success with Black Locust seeds. So does the Very Hot Water Overnight replace the Cold Stratification needed in the wild? If so that would make germinating them quicker.
I hope you can take some photos of how the seeds germinating, your experience is the kind of stuff I was looking for so thank you for the valuable info!
That’s right, or at least in my experience. I’ll get some out of the fridge (I’m in the UK where most summers are too cool and cloudy for it to successfully set viable seed so I’ve got a bag of bought seed. It’s kept refrigerated but dry so that shouldn’t affect the dormancy/stratification). I’ll update in a few days.
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Oh no… wow I didn’t realize how Important the Hot & Sunny Weather is here for proper seed forming. I’ve heard it’s very cloudy there & non cloudy days are uncommon, has that been your experience?
Pretty much. If a species is in its natural range it means it is there without the influence of humans. If glaciers wiped it out, then it is no longer native. Its generally assumed (right or wrong) that environmental changes in the last couple hundred years are human derrived… for the sake of the term “native” in this context… as a scientific term. We didn’t have black locusts and when itroduced by be mankind they alter our forst makeup and get out of hand like kudzu down south… yea that is an exageration but it does choke out a forest and has no pests in Wisconsin.
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This is pretty much the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Convention on Biological Diversity definition. But what is natural is a bit hazy. other bodies use different definitions, such as any organism that arrived without the aid of humans into some area within the last 16,000 years or since the Last Glacial Maximum or some other point in time. A handful of groups also include some verbiage about an ecological role or about having evolved within a given environment and being well suited to it.
Those are the definitions, and it’s not like I have the authority to change those definitions. But fortunately, I’m free to ignore them as the less than useless dictates from some bureaucratic body that they are.
When people talk about native or nonnative, what they are usually doing is making an argument about whether a particular species belongs somewhere or not. But that’s a different thing. Native is about where thing is from, but “from here” and “should be here” aren’t the same thing. One is a factoid about some slice of history, the other one is a normative claim that’s based on some kind of ideal about what the world should look like.
Traditionally, conservationists have defined what the world should look like as “whatever it was like before people, or more often specifically Europeans arrived and changed things aka screwed it all up.” In my region that means that the ideal is whatever it looked like in the 1600s. Which is to say, whatever it looked like after ten to twenty thousand years of direct human intervention…
There’s a reason fire-adapted longleaf pine covered most of the Southeast when the Europeans arrived, but the reason isn’t because that’s the natural balance of things, the reason is because there were hundreds of thousands to millions of people living in the Southeast whose entire system of agriculture was predicated on burning the woodlands on an annual to semi-annual basis. The vast expanses of longleaf pine savannas in the southeast that traditional conservationists in my area idealize as natural and as how things should be were, in a large part, manmade.
There’s a subtle racism that’s built into that framework (eg Native Americans were more or less nature, not people, and they didn’t use technology to alter their environment, or the technology they used doesn’t count as human technology, etc.), but beyond that, it’s just a really dumb framework. Who the frick cares what it was like five hundred years ago? What matters is how good, or bad, it can be today. Black locust in Wisconsin is a fact of nature, regardless of if humans or nature put them there, and now we have to do the best we can with that. Are they causing damage to the ecosystem, and how much, and in what proportion to the benefits they also bring? And how much damage would removing them cause, and what’s the opportunity cost? Every hour spent by a conservationist digging out black locust roots is another hour not spend propagating rare milkweeds or helping a farmer manage a tallgrass prairie restoration project, or helping suburbanites plant shrubs and small trees along their property line and set out traps to catch and eliminate stray dogs and cats.
Black locust is an aggressive pioneer plant. It is going to colonize disturbed habitats in favorable climates, that’s it’s ecological role. A twenty or thirty years of nearly monoculture black locust is the natural ecology of black locust in cold temperate climates. It’s whole function is to take over disturbed areas, choke out the grasses and shrubs, and create a dense cover where only late-successional hardwoods can grow–a dense cover that late-successional hardwoods can also only grow in in most circumstances. Being a legume to boot makes black locust all the more suited to this role.
If there’s a lot of black locust, the problem isn’t the black locust, the problem is the abundance of disturbed habitat.
In my area, black locust does poorly and never becomes particularly aggressive, but we have a number of plants that do. Some are non-native, like “mimosa” Albizia julibrissin (not a true mimosa, though in the mimosid clade in fairness) and chinaberry, Melia azedarach. Mimosa is very common in pine plantations as an understory and chinaberry colonizes field margins, while both are extremely common in suburban areas and recent developments. And, in all honesty, I’m not particularly bothered by them, even if they fit almost all the definitions of invasive. Other than mimosa, there’s not much that actually will grow in pine plantations, and mimosa produces abundant nectar in summer when not much else blooms and the beans are consumed by lots of different birds and mammals and are a good source of protein in a region with very, very, very few native legumes. Plus the leaves are highly palatable and are a favorite of deer and certain insects. When compared to the immature pines they’re growing with or the sweetgum that would be growing on those sites otherwise, they honestly are probably supporting more wildlife and performing more ecosystem services. Plus they are nitrogen fixers.
Chinaberry is different but similar. It takes over field margins and old barns extremely quickly, in a large part because it is bird-dispersed and those are the places birds spend a lot of time. Not much seems to eat chinaberry leaves as they’re mildly toxic, but the flowers are very early and support native bees that are active in the early spring, and birds really seem to like the berries–probably because they are one of the few, perhaps the only, berry that ripens in late winter to early spring in our area. Chinaberry also sets very heavy crops every year, and the berries have a good flesh-to-seed ratio. Less obviously, chinaberry also serves an important role in forest regeneration. I’ve noticed that in our area a lot of field margins become thickets where grape vines, honey suckle, poison ivy, and virginia creeper are the dominant plants and they smother out or literally pull down most trees that try to establish. Partly because they arrive first, partly because they grow so quickly, and partly because they self-prune and lot and have brittle branches that break off fairly easily, chinaberry seem uniquely good at punching through those vine thickets and forming a canopy that keeps the vines in check. At which point, oaks and hickories can actually establish and eventually take over.
We also have a native species that is similar. Sweetgum is, by far, our most common tree species after loblolly pine. And it’s hella invasive. It grows spreads like a weed, grows quickly, is wind pollinated and has tiny seeds that most animals don’t or can’t eat, and it’s a trash tree that’s only good for pulping. And it can spread clonally. Despite being such an aggressive trash tree though, I’m not all that bothered by the fact that basically every other hardwood around here is sweetgum, or by the fact that probably three quarters of our woodlands are a monoculture of sweetgum and pine. But, well, at least three quarters of our woodlands around here get logged every two to three decades. That’s going to heavily favor pioneer species no matter what. At least now we’ve got multiple kinds of pioneer species and it’s not just sweetgum for miles and miles.
Not to say there aren’t some invasives that are net negative, or there aren’t areas or conditions in which they might be net negative. In those cases, if removing them isn’t excessively costly, then sure, remove them. But nine times out of ten, it’s an ecosystem problem, not an species problem. The symptom is an invasive monoculture, but that’s not the actual problem.
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A side note – Black locust is also apparently a very good wood for a one-piece bow, though it is very hard and therefore tough to work. I’m interested in crafting my own bow and did some research on suitable woods in my area. I also harvested some 6’ lengths of the straightest black locust that I could find. For this purpose, a straight un-knotted segment is ideal.
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