Your last picture is Trifoliate Orange, or Lemon Locust. You can actually eat the zest from the plant and it tastes like lemon. Otherwise, it's not edible.
Having surveyed and hunted all over Texas, I can unequivocally tell you, that it is the WORST of all of the plants that stick. Honey and Black Locust is bad, Devils Walking Stick is primarily on the bank of the creek and cuts easily, cat claw is tough but short. Trifoliate Orange grows so dense, thick and tall though, that it's on par with the shelters built in Africa to keep lions out, and it works. If you were to put that on a fence row, you'd never need to mend the fence again as no cow will go through it and it would probably deter even the randiest of bulls.
Yucca plant is great. You can do so many things with it that I don't kill them from the farm. I make cordage and hand and bow drills from the materials. 30' of that takes a while to make, but has the tensile strength greater than 550 cord. I've even waxed cord made from it and it lasts for years.
Screw the lemon locust though. Other than the mild ability to heal scurvy, which can be done with tea made from pine needles as well, it has ZERO redeeming quality for me, about like a red wasp.
Yucca is also a great hiding place for snakes attempting to stay cool on a hot day. At least that's what Mrs. Cow tells me. Her brother know has the thousand acres of yucca she used to call home when she was a youngster.
Holy Cow, post: 390750, member: 50 wrote: While descending a very steep grade...
The only steep grade in the entire state; and cow manages to cut a huge gash in his shin...
It's a good thing you don't do a lot of work in the Cascades :p
Holy Cow, post: 390750, member: 50 wrote: Dang, Andy, here's that same farm thing a 1000 miles apart.
In 1974 I was helping a guy with some cattle in the Flint Hills. While descending a very steep grade I managed to step just perfectly. A dead weed still standing straight despite having been snapped off at a height of about eighteen inches ran up my pant leg, slid past the sock and gouged a three-inch path about a quarter inch to the left of my shin bone. I'm looking at that scar while attempting to hit all the right keys on the keyboard.
You were a year early, mine happened in 1975.
Locally with all the above thorny plants, then there are the dozens or more variety of briars that consist of some of the most dense parts of the forests that bite back.
From the ordinary 1/8in thick vine with thorns to the one inch rattan with 1+in razor sharp claws that cut thru leather, any of them make you bleed and cause cat scratch fever when the wounds are not attended to before they heal.
Then there are grass burrs that are so unforgiving as drawn by some magnetic force they simply attach themselves to any part of your clothing to strike when you relax and think the job is done.
To say noting about that ball of thorns called a cocklebur that can cause a major disaster for any living thing with long hair or when jammed into a private space where they definitely don't belong.
Chickweed can put an end to your springtime barefootin'.
[USER=50]@Holy Cow[/USER] and Andy Bruner
One of the hardest thing to teach a new brush cutter is to cut brush low to the ground and from the side to avoid creating a weapon to fall upon, walk over and around or into.
About the same time frame as your incidents, a fellow crew chief was walking down a cut line and had an end of a cut limb to enter his nostril and make its way into his sinus cavity.
We rushed him to the hospital and the local doctors were at a loss and he was at Baylor Med in Dallas by nightfall.
Limb was covered with some kind of mold that caused all kinds of complications for years.
His big Irish knob of nose was reduced to scar tissue and some breathing holes.
Alright, whoever started this (I'm to lazy to go look), you ruined my day!!
Gonna go find a tequila!
Kris Morgan, post: 390756, member: 29 wrote: Trifoliate Orange grows so dense, thick and tall though, that it's on par with the shelters built in Africa to keep lions out, and it works.
I really wanted to post exactly that.
I really dig the photos that get posted on thick brush, just kinda' makes you smile. 🙂
and what happened to the tumbs-up button?
