Growing Thornless Honeylocust Trees from Seed!

Hey, Dirk Farmer Jay here from DirkFarmerJay.com. Honey locust trees are an incredible variety for around the home and the farm, and they are easy to propagate. I'll show you a couple tips how to do that. Stay tuned. Hey, Dirk Farmer Jay here from DirkFarmerJay.com. There's several good reasons why you should consider growing honey locust trees, the thornless variety, around your homestead. First of all, they're easy to acquire seed stock because they're usually found throughout your community. Number two, there's a generous amount of seed pods that are generated in the fall that make it easy for you to harvest these, and then we'll show you how to process them in just a few minutes. Also, these are pretty rapidly growing trees, and they reach 30 to 40 feet typically, and possess a light dappled shade because of their leaf shape. And also, they are real additive to your landscape and to wildlife. Oh, I need to give you one little caveat. The way that we are propagating these plants is that we're using seeds, not stem or root material. Therefore, it's not going to be a perfect clone or an exact clone of the parent plant. And if they are in open pasture, cattle will graze on the beans, and I hear tell that also wildlife like the beans as well. There's even an active discussion of whether or not they act as a legume and actually put nitrogen back into the soil. So with all these things going for it, why not consider propagating some yourself? Well, how do you do that? There's just a couple tips you need to know, a little insider's information about the conditions that the seeds themselves need to germinate and to start flourishing. So the first thing you need to know is that it's going to come in a pod like this. And once these have been harvested in the fall, I put them in a bucket, a sealed bucket, and keep them outside over the winter. And that is to stratify them. That is, you have to put the seeds through a freeze-thaw cycle that allows the plant or the seed itself to say, winter has passed, now it's safe to germinate. Now to get them to germinate, the first thing you need to do is to get them out of these pods. And I want you to notice something really quickly. If you look close there, you'll see holes in that. And that's because borers, insects will get into them in the fall as an excellent feed source. You'll notice that not all of them have borer holes in them and that those that have not been compromised are likely to be highly viable. Now let me give you just a real quick look-see on a bean or the beans that have been compromised and that these would not be used to germinate. So if you look careful there, you can see right there that there is a borer hole. Same with this one. Those would just go in the compost pile or be thrown away. They're not going to be viable. However, if you harvest others and you continue to do your work, you're going to see that there's all sorts of nice little beans. And you can see the scale by the size of my hand of the size of these beans when they're in their dry state. Now these are extremely hard. I can't crush them with my fingers. They're not giving at all. They're harder than I think a coffee bean is. And you can see they're pretty small. Now you've got to do a couple things right away to get these ready to germinate. And you're going to do a process known as scarification. That is dissolving outside seed coat or softening it so that moisture can get into the interior of the seed, allowing it to imbibe, swell up with moisture, and the germination process to occur. You can do that one of two ways. You can put them in very warm water and soak them for multiple days. Or you can actually assist by nicking the seed coat. Okay, so let me show you the difference between seeds that have been scarified and those that have not. How it affects how fast the seed will imbibe. What I'm going to show you here are seeds that we never nicked the seed coat. They were not scarified or scarred and therefore you're going to get inconsistent amount of imbibing of moisture that allows the seed to swell and be ready to germinate. You'll notice down here there's several that have never taken on moisture. And so there's two reasons you want to scarify. One, so you get a much better yield of the amount that will germinate. And number two, the amount of time. These have been sitting here for three days to get to this point. Ain't nobody got time for that. There's one in that time. You can see the original nick. You can see it imbibing water. And just to give you a sense of scale on those, I'm going to go ahead and put a couple that have not been nicked and soaked. And in those last several hours, this has swollen up. Now if you look down in here though, you'll see not all of them have done this. So I'd probably just leave them overnight. And this is certainly a way to speed up getting these ready to germinate. Okay, now you're going to take the bean hulls. These of course have sat over winter in a dry spot that allows them to stratify. And you can just simply process a large amount of these. It's going to be a little messy when you do. And then I check them as I go just to make sure they're not compromised. So you would do that with a whole bunch of them. And there you can see that I have a bunch of these ready to go. Now I'm going to keep them separate as I nick the seed coat. I'll just put them into this little bin here. I'm using one of these types of latching type of forceps. Use these in the shop. You can get them at hardware stores, an electrical area. You can get them surgical supply online, etc. But as you can see, this allows you to clamp something and to hold pressure at the tip. And that's what you're going to need to work with these. So I take one of the seeds, which by the way, tend to be quite hard and slippery. And I put them on the table. And I do a clamp on them. So I'm just holding on. I can't really, in this case, get them all the way shut. So I'm just going to clamp it, hold on tight, and I'm going to put them over the edge of something. And then taking a triangular file, which has a sharp edge running on three edges, I'm just simply going to score across the side of the seed. As you can see, it's going to want to move on you. And you'll get good at this as you go. So here we go. And now I have that going. And I have now scarred the seed right there. And I have a nick in the seed coat. Now in reality, I've already done several of these. And all of these beans right here have the seed coat scarred. So right now we've just taken some tap water. The amount, just make sure that you can cover the seeds well. And I could do a lot more seeds in this batch of water than what you see here. And you can't see this well on the camera, but this is reading 167 degrees right now. The goal is 190, not above 190. You want to warm the seeds, soften them, get water into them quickly, but you do not want to boil them. Let's go ahead and take our seeds. We're going to put them in there right about 190 degrees. As you can see, a few degrees up or down from that, that's fine. We're going to go ahead and pour those in. Let's look and see how long it takes for these to imbibe versus days, how many hours it is that we can get these to be ready to plant. Okay, now the time has come to go ahead and pot the seeds. Now, whether you were able to scarify them and speed up the process or just let them soak for multiple days, this is what they look like now. They're nice and moist and they are ready to put into medium cells with regular potting mix here. And so what we'll do is go ahead and just open up a little bit on each one of these. Okay, there we have a nice flat of these ready to go. Let's get them over onto some bottom heat as well as some light. All right, after these were placed on bottom heat and then put under grow lights, now we no longer have them on bottom heat at this point. So we're just letting them grow with ambient temperature in our potting shed. It's probably about 60 degrees in here right now. But you can see after about three weeks, there are still some that are germinating, that are coming up. Here's one right in the background right over here. But others have definitely made a race reaching for the sky, so to speak, for the light. And you can see very much their characteristic honey locust leafing out. You can see the original cotyleons here, right here, the primary leaves that happen when germination occurs and then the secondary leaves and then true life really takes off. Now, to just give you a little scale of how tall these are, there's my hand. So these little guys here are between three and four inches, but definitely on their way. So we will pot these up into the next pot on after we put them out and give them more sun and keep them nourished and moist. And once they reach about oh two to three foot tall, then we'll go ahead and get them out either to friends and neighbors or into our yard scape. Well, there you have it. Now you can go ahead and grow your own honey locust trees from locally sourced seeds. Hey, if you found this video to be helpful, won't you please like it and better yet, won't you subscribe? That helps us to continue to put out great content for the home, the garden, and the kitchen. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.