Thornless Hershey Honey Locust Seedlings (2-4′)

Our seedlings are grown from seed from trees selected by John Hershey for high yields and low thorns and collected at his home farm in Downingtown, PA. 

As seedlings, we cannot promise anything about the specific qualities of the trees. Some will be male, some female, while only females yield pods. Some trees may even develop thorns as they mature. In full disclosure, we have seen seemingly thornless honey locusts develop thorns as they grow older which is why we moved away from selling seedlings. But we feel these are valuable trees, given the parentage they come from. All seed was collected from thick, fleshy pods with sugar content above 30%. 

Regarding thorniness, here’s the backstory on these trees. We sent seed to several nurseries in early 2022 to grow out for us and sell directly to their customers, as we wanted to stay out of the nursery business.. But by the end of that year we were seeing too many honey locust seedlings develop thorns, and the nurseries were seeing a large portion of the trees they were growing out developing thorns ( up to 80% of the batch!) Given the significant issue of honey locust thorns, we halted all sales of honey locust seedlings and bought every single seedling those nurseries had grown for us. We tossed all the thorny trees, and planted the remaining 6,000+ thornless seedlings to be grown out to a larger size. These seedlings have now had one year growing in the original nursery bed and two full years growing in a larger bed. At the end of 2023, they were culled for thorns. Any tree with any thorns was removed, and all other trees were pruned to a central leader. Some honey locusts seem to develop thorns as a stress response to pruning, so we wanted to give these trees every chance they could to develop thorns, so we could cull them as hard as possible. The trees were also pruned in mid-2024. 

While the majority of our seedlings are completely thornless, we cannot guarantee that they will remain thornless, but we have given them every opportunity to develop thorns over 3 years and multiple rounds of pruning.

The ideal use of these seedling trees is in genetic selection. Many of these seedlings should be on par or even better than the parent trees they come from. Our ideal honey locust is completely thornless, female, and consistently yields good crops of high sugar pods. Some of these seedlings will fit that bill, and the best of the best can be selected for further propagation for use on other farms. Though we can’t require it, we ask that folks purchasing these seedlings be willing to be in communication with Trees For Graziers about what characteristics they see develop from the trees in the years ahead.

Volume Discounts: 1-9 trees for $35. 10-99 trees for $22. 100+ trees for $15.

Shipping: We will ship trees by UPS in early spring.