Black locust fence posts

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Last week I was talking to a friend in the horse business – she knows lots about fencing. When I told her about the black locust fence posts, that after fifty years you dig them up and just replant them upside down for another fifty years, she finished my sentence before I could get to the end. Some farms diversify their crops by using black locust as a crop – the trees can be harvested for fence posts and will sprout from that cut area, you’ll get a new trunk to harvest for fence posts again in a dozen years. But this tree suckers, sending up new sprouts from roots and makes impenetrable thickets due to those wicked thorns and it comes up from seeds, too. Although native, in some states it’s listed as invasive.