Herbal Medicine for Preppers: Locust

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[00:02:34] herbs and wild edible plants and all the stuff that I really love. So all right, now let's get into the show. Today, we're continuing our series on the medicinal uses of trees. And this was a really interesting one. It's locust or the rubini. I think it's rubinia. Yeah, species. Locust is super common in the mountains where I live, especially black locust and really

[00:03:02] very, very, very, very much used for fence posts, especially because you can cut black locust and

[00:03:08] turn into fence posts and put it in the ground untreated and they won't rot. So, you know, it's one of probably three trees that we would

[00:03:18] mention like white oak, hickory and white pine. So I guess four without which settling the mountains,

[00:03:27] the Appalachian Mountains would have been impossible. You know, I'll add chestnut. Chestnut was a major source of food for people before the chestnut blight wiped

[00:03:35] it out. It probably saved countless lives because, I mean, it was, you know, chestnuts have slightly more nutritional value than, well, actually a lot more. Well, they're a lot like

[00:03:48] potatoes, but with protein. And you can cook them and eat them like potatoes. You can eat them like nuts or you can, you know, roast them, put them in soups. You can do so.

[00:03:56] So that really saved a lot of lives. And then, you know, hickory was used for making tools and white oak and white pine for home building and barn building and all that.

[00:04:08] And then the locusts for making fence posts and without which people wouldn't have been able to keep cattle and such. So, or horses. I mean, you know, you had to have fences.

[00:04:20] And because we didn't have hedgerows and such like they do in England. So, yeah, I mean, these were the essential trees to settling the Appalachian Mountains.

[00:04:29] So, and locusts are really pretty and the flowers are edible in the spring. You can fry them up in batter and make like, you know, fritters as they call them.

[00:04:37] They're really pretty good. Now, the pods on the black locust are inedible.

[00:04:42] Locust is also a leguminous tree. That means it's in the same family actually as beans. Believe it or not. Yeah.

[00:04:51] And those pods are essentially its bean, right?

[00:04:54] What's great about locusts and another reason they were grown so much in the mountains is all legumes draw nitrogen out of the atmosphere

[00:05:05] and fix it in the soil through a fungal relationship. Basically, you know, a mushroom mycelium that grows around the roots.

[00:05:16] That is free fertilizer. I mean, so if you grew locusts, you had a lot of people grow them in there and around their apple orchards and such.

[00:05:25] And they didn't necessarily know why, but the apples grew better. The apple trees grew better.

[00:05:30] Again, you know, around gardens, a lot of people would trellis grapevines and such up locust trees, even though locusts are thorny.

[00:05:38] So when you went to harvest, you might get all scratched up and they'll really cut you up. They're big thorns.

[00:05:44] Now, my favorite locust tree actually does not grow in my region.

[00:05:48] And it is the honey locust.

[00:05:51] And there's a lot of controversy right now among taxonomists and botanists and all that over whether or not the honey locust is a true locust.

[00:06:02] It does not seem to have the same nitrogen fixing properties, but it does have great big thorns.

[00:06:10] And in fact, especially those, I guess, are they native to Australia? I'm not sure.

[00:06:16] But the thorns grow so big that they can be used as nails.

[00:06:20] You can actually cut the thorns off the tree and they're hard and you can hammer them in just as you would use nails.

[00:06:27] So super, super useful.

[00:06:29] But even more than that, the honey locust pod is edible and around the little beans in it or seeds, whatever you want to think of it,

[00:06:37] is a thick, essentially a caramel.

[00:06:41] I mean, it is literally like caramelized sugar.

[00:06:44] So truly one of the most useful trees, I mean, you can get all the sugar that you need from one honey locust tree.

[00:06:51] They will drop in the fall, winter, about this time of year.

[00:06:54] They will drop, I mean, one tree will probably drop two, three hundred pounds of those seed pots.

[00:06:59] I mean, maybe not that much.

[00:07:01] Maybe it's more like 50 to 100.

[00:07:03] But I mean, it seems, I mean, you can fill up a couple of trash cans with them and just huge amounts.

[00:07:09] And before they dry, they are kind of heavy.

[00:07:11] And what you want to do is you dry them.

[00:07:13] You can even roast them.

[00:07:14] But you can make honey locust beer just out of those pods.

[00:07:19] It is a one-to-one substitute for honey.

[00:07:22] And it's wonderful.

[00:07:24] It's one of the best trees you can grow, even though, you know, if you put it in your landscaping and don't use those pods,

[00:07:30] it can be a real pain to rake everything up and dispose of it in the fall.

[00:07:34] I've heard a lot of people complain about that.

[00:07:37] But anyone who's complained about it doesn't realize that they're edible and they're throwing away a fortune in free sugar.

[00:07:45] And I mean, seriously.

[00:07:46] So, you know, whenever I find my permanent property, if I ever do, I'm going to be planting black locust around the perimeter.

[00:07:56] You can coppice black locust.

[00:07:58] I mean, you cut it down.

[00:07:59] You cut one tree down after it's grown up, I don't know, maybe six inches diameter.

[00:08:04] You cut it down to the stump or you can go a little higher.

[00:08:08] And it will start sending out shoots from the side of the stump.

[00:08:11] So one tree becomes like 12 trees.

[00:08:14] And you can continually harvest it for firewood.

[00:08:17] But because it's thorny and because it's a very hard wood, you can use it to make essentially an impenetrable pentrow, a boundary.

[00:08:28] I would plant black locust along with Oregon grape, which is nice and prickly and thorny.

[00:08:33] Maybe some yuccas, prickly pear cactus.

[00:08:38] Or just, you know what, a row of Oregon grape with thorny blackberries.

[00:08:43] And nothing's getting through there that's bigger than a rabbit.

[00:08:46] I mean, literally, it'll keep people off your property.

[00:08:48] It'll keep deer out of your garden.

[00:08:50] Wonderful.

[00:08:51] But definitely want to plant maybe a dozen honey locusts.

[00:08:55] They're much larger trees.

[00:08:57] They grow very big.

[00:08:58] And they're great for timber.

[00:08:59] I mean, they're very useful.

[00:09:00] But, I mean, free sugar.

[00:09:03] Free, I mean, literally.

[00:09:04] I mean, I would like to keep some bees if I can get to where I don't have a ton of bears on my property.

[00:09:11] Because where I live now, we got a lot of bears.

[00:09:14] I mean, a lot of bears.

[00:09:16] There are more bears than people where I live.

[00:09:19] And they dig up underground beehives.

[00:09:22] They'll destroy any hives you have.

[00:09:23] I mean, bears do love honey.

[00:09:26] But the honey locust is also good forage for bears and deer and such as that.

[00:09:32] So it's great to plant if you want to hunt and you want to manage your property for hunting.

[00:09:36] But also a free source of nails.

[00:09:38] I mean, as well as timber.

[00:09:41] I mean, how can you go wrong, right?

[00:09:43] Just don't drive too close to it because those thorns will tear up your tires.

[00:09:47] They'll just rip them to shreds.

[00:09:48] So now let's talk about the medicinal use of the locusts.

[00:09:56] And plants are, let me see.

[00:09:58] I'll start with Resources of the Southern Fields and Forest written in the 1860s.

[00:10:04] And this was a French botanist.

[00:10:05] And he called, he identified the yellow locust tree.

[00:10:09] And he called it false acacia.

[00:10:12] Being European, he was more familiar with the acacias.

[00:10:17] They do seem to be related.

[00:10:19] They're also leguminous.

[00:10:20] Also related to mimosa, which is leguminous.

[00:10:24] Acacias have the unique, shall we say, quality of containing the psychedelic drug DMT in the root bark.

[00:10:36] So they are different plants.

[00:10:39] But he said of Robina pseudoacacia.

[00:10:44] So false acacia is how it was classified at the time.

[00:10:48] Or yellow locust, as we might know it.

[00:10:50] He said grow in the mountains of North and South Carolina.

[00:10:53] And as far down as Charleston and St. John.

[00:10:58] Near Ward's Plantation, New Bern, Florida.

[00:11:01] So a fairly southern tree.

[00:11:03] He said the flowers are aromatic and emollient, which means softening.

[00:11:08] And antispasmodic syrup is made from them.

[00:11:11] And Gendron, who was a doctor at the time, or I think he was actually a medical professor, states that when given to infants, it produces sleep.

[00:11:19] It can also be used to induce vomiting and sometimes slight convulsive movement.

[00:11:25] So we would want to be rather careful with that.

[00:11:27] But he relates a case where it was swallowed by boys in whom the narcotic effects were induced.

[00:11:34] And that was documented in medical journals.

[00:11:38] U.S. Dispensatory, the 12th edition, so this is official medicine, states that the bark of the root is said to be tonic.

[00:11:46] I think they mean helps with digestion, good for the stomach.

[00:11:49] And in large doses of manic and purgative, so vomiting and diarrhea, basically.

[00:11:54] And he reports from, let's see, this medical journal from 1860, three cases of poisoning in children from eating the roots.

[00:12:05] They all recovered.

[00:12:07] The symptoms were like those produced by an overdose of belladonna.

[00:12:11] So that's probably why this is called false acacia.

[00:12:14] You know, I mentioned that the acacia tree can actually, you have to do some chemical processing, but it can produce DMT.

[00:12:23] Well, if the symptoms of this false acacia were like an overdose of belladonna, which is a very poisonous psychedelic drug, that would make a lot of sense.

[00:12:39] Okay?

[00:12:40] It doesn't just look like it has similar effects to the acacia.

[00:12:43] It says one of them who happened to be laboring under intermittent fever at the time had no return of the paroxysm, so could be useful as well.

[00:12:51] Well, he adds, these facts render caution advisable in the use of the root, yet are also well calculated to stimulate inquiry.

[00:13:01] Mills said that the best bows of Indians were made from this tree.

[00:13:05] So, there's yet another use of the yellow locust.

[00:13:10] You could, you know, use it like you or lemon wood or anything you might make a nice bow out of.

[00:13:16] I have a beautiful lemon wood long bow.

[00:13:19] It's a good 120 years old.

[00:13:22] I shoot it maybe, you know, two, three times a year because it's, well, I don't want to break it.

[00:13:29] It is, it will start to get a little more flexible with use, you know.

[00:13:34] Actually, when I just string it up, the draw weight is probably 75 pounds, I'm going to say.

[00:13:40] And if I shoot it more than a couple dozen times, that draw weight starts coming down and it's, you know, stops losing its shape.

[00:13:47] So, it's more of a collectible than anything else.

[00:13:50] But I do really enjoy archery.

[00:13:55] I have a great recurve bow that I use a lot more often.

[00:13:59] It's, you know, it's a good weight for hunting.

[00:14:01] And, I mean, I just, I love archery.

[00:14:03] You know, it's a wonderful hobby.

[00:14:04] It's really, when I'm in the best shape of my life, I'm chopping wood, obviously.

[00:14:11] And, in the morning after a cup of coffee, I'll go out and take a dozen shots with my bow.

[00:14:16] You know, good 75, 100 pound draw weight bow.

[00:14:20] Not like, you know, well, I mean, I used to have a really nice compound bow.

[00:14:24] But, I mean, even though it had a lot more velocity behind that arrow, the draw weight, you know, the wheels make it a little easier to pull back.

[00:14:35] A legit recurve or long bow will put you in shape like nothing else.

[00:14:40] I mean, what it'll do for your back and shoulders, it's fantastic, really.

[00:14:46] I mean, and that's a fun way to get some good exercise, too, is to take just a few practice shots with your bow and arrows.

[00:14:54] Wonderful.

[00:14:54] And, of course, I've got a crossbow, and I've got a lot of different stuff.

[00:14:58] And, you know, I mean, it comes down to a survival situation.

[00:15:02] You're going to run out of bullets.

[00:15:04] If you learn to, if you learn archery, you can always make arrows.

[00:15:10] A little difficult to make them for a crossbow.

[00:15:12] You have to do bolts on that.

[00:15:14] You would need access to some metal materials or risk the arrow just snapping and flying back and stabbing you in the face or the eyes.

[00:15:25] It would not be fun.

[00:15:26] But as long as you're good with a recurve or a long bow, you know, you can probably survive.

[00:15:31] I mean, I would say, I mean, you know, an arrow's never going to beat a bullet in terms of efficiency and such.

[00:15:39] But it's a wonderful survival tool to learn.

[00:15:42] And I've mentioned before so many times blowguns.

[00:15:44] I really enjoy practicing with my blowguns as well.

[00:15:49] And for small game, super.

[00:15:53] I mean, silent.

[00:15:56] Easily concealed.

[00:15:58] Just, they're wonderful.

[00:15:59] But anyway, let's go back to locust trees.

[00:16:02] And there's yet another use for, like, if you had locusts with those big woody thorns that are almost as tough as nails and can be very long, especially on the honey locust tree.

[00:16:14] With a blowgun or mollag, they could be used very easily as arrow points.

[00:16:19] I mean, yeah, there's another use for it.

[00:16:21] Another reason to have these trees.

[00:16:23] And if you coppice, like I said, with the black locust, it's a continual source of firewood.

[00:16:28] You keep harvesting from the same trees every three or four years.

[00:16:33] You just get them in a routine.

[00:16:35] So, I mean, I do think they're incredibly useful.

[00:16:39] But King's Medical Dispensatory of 1898 says,

[00:16:43] From the root, I guess the chemist, I'm not going to try to pronounce his name, isolated aspergium.

[00:16:53] The flowers, according to another couple, I'm not going to try to pronounce their names,

[00:16:58] The black locust tree, which is a non-fermentable sugar,

[00:17:02] That's why we call the species rubina.

[00:17:07] Very often, black locust is a rubina.

[00:17:10] Upon which hydrolysis is split into quercetin and non-fermentable sugar.

[00:17:17] That's from the flowers.

[00:17:19] You know, quercetin is a very important antioxidant.

[00:17:22] But a non-fermentable sugar, that's interesting.

[00:17:24] The bark of the locust tree, when chewed, produces violent emetocartharsis.

[00:17:30] In other words, it'll make you throw up.

[00:17:31] And if you've been poisoned, that's a real good thing to do.

[00:17:34] Otherwise, you don't want to do it.

[00:17:37] Latter authors searching for poisonous principle found it in the albuminous,

[00:17:44] Boy, that's hard to say.

[00:17:45] Albuminous.

[00:17:46] There you go.

[00:17:47] Albuminous.

[00:17:50] Body of whatever it is.

[00:17:52] One of the components.

[00:17:54] It is tasteless, soluble in water, insoluble in alcohol,

[00:17:57] And will coagulate when heated with complete loss of its toxic properties.

[00:18:03] So heating it actually gets rid of the toxicity.

[00:18:06] And for this reason, some declare decoction of the bark inert.

[00:18:09] So better in water if you need it as an emetic.

[00:18:13] Let's see.

[00:18:18] They go into a lot of ways to separate out the alkaloids.

[00:18:22] And we're not going to get into all that.

[00:18:25] Anyway.

[00:18:27] Action medicinal uses and doses.

[00:18:29] A decoction of the root bark is tonic in small doses.

[00:18:33] But emetic and purgative in large ones.

[00:18:35] An ounce of the bark boiled in three gills of water.

[00:18:39] It's given in the morning and evening.

[00:18:42] If you need that.

[00:18:44] You know.

[00:18:44] It could be used as a laxative and such, essentially.

[00:18:48] The bark is supposed to possess some acronarcotic properties,

[00:18:52] as the juice of it has been known to produce coma.

[00:18:55] And slight convulsion.

[00:18:56] So we definitely don't want to mess around with that.

[00:18:59] An overdose has produced symptoms very similar to those resulting from an improper dose of belladonna.

[00:19:05] Again.

[00:19:05] But at the same time, it has been known to cure a case of fever and ague.

[00:19:10] So they're actually referencing the same source, I think, there in 1860 as they did in 1898.

[00:19:16] The flowers possess antispasmodic properties.

[00:19:19] So it can help with cramping and such.

[00:19:21] And form an excellent and agreeable syrup.

[00:19:25] The leaves operate mildly and efficiently as an emetic.

[00:19:30] Make sure you throw up.

[00:19:31] And the drug should be tested for its effects upon gastrointestinal and nervous affections.

[00:19:38] Now, modern use.

[00:19:39] Plants for a future.

[00:19:40] A black locust, they say, is febri-fuge.

[00:19:43] That means it helps with fevers.

[00:19:44] It says the flowers are antispasmodic, aromatic, diuretic, emollient, and laxative.

[00:19:50] They are cooked and eaten for the treatment of eye ailments.

[00:19:55] I've never actually heard that before.

[00:19:57] I mean, cooked and eaten just as a good spring food.

[00:19:59] They're really nice.

[00:20:01] But for eye ailments, not sure about that.

[00:20:05] The flower is said to contain the anti-tumor compound benzoaldehyde.

[00:20:13] There you go.

[00:20:14] Benzoaldehyde.

[00:20:15] The inner bark and the root bark are emetic, purgative, and tonic.

[00:20:18] The root bark has been chewed to induce vomiting or held in the mouth to a lay toothache.

[00:20:24] That's interesting.

[00:20:25] Though it is very rarely prescribed as a therapeutic agent in Britain.

[00:20:29] The fruit is narcotic.

[00:20:31] This probably refers to the seed pod.

[00:20:34] So the pod itself, not the seeds, which are actually quite toxic.

[00:20:38] The leaves are a colegog and emetic.

[00:20:40] And the leaf juice inhibits viruses.

[00:20:42] Wow, I didn't know that.

[00:20:43] That's very useful if you don't throw it up, I guess.

[00:20:48] Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Medicinal Plant states,

[00:20:51] American Indians chewed the root bark to induce vomiting,

[00:20:54] held bark in the mouth to a lay toothache.

[00:20:57] A folctonic, purgative, emetic flower tea used in rheumatism.

[00:21:01] Interesting.

[00:21:02] In China, the root bark is also considered purgative and emetic,

[00:21:05] and the flower is considered diuretic.

[00:21:07] The flowers contain a glycoside, Rabinin, which is experimentally diuretic.

[00:21:13] Warning, all parts of the plant are toxic.

[00:21:16] Even honey derived from the flowers is said to be toxic.

[00:21:19] Yes, that is true.

[00:21:21] But that's what the black locust is what we're talking about here.

[00:21:23] And before, when he said the yellow locust, I think that's the black locust.

[00:21:29] I think probably the same tree, actually.

[00:21:32] The wood is somewhat yellowish.

[00:21:34] I think that's where, but the, anyway.

[00:21:36] The strong odor of the flowers has been reported to cause nausea and headaches in some persons.

[00:21:42] And yes, it will do that, actually.

[00:21:44] Some people have extreme allergy to black locust.

[00:21:48] Now, remember, honey locust, two different plants.

[00:21:54] Very, somewhat similar.

[00:21:56] Very different.

[00:21:59] Both very, very useful.

[00:22:01] I mean, as I said, this is like one of the essential plants for survival.

[00:22:05] And, you know, I mean, maybe not as essential as apples and pears and such for food,

[00:22:11] but I don't know.

[00:22:12] Honey locust definitely could be.

[00:22:15] But for firewood, for building, for fences, for all that,

[00:22:19] I would definitely put this on my essentials list.

[00:22:21] So I'll wrap that one up there.

[00:22:23] Y'all have a great week.

[00:22:25] And I'll talk to you next time.

[00:22:28] The information in this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or condition.

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