@Tristian Wolf oh wow inside of beans sounds cool how do you prepare them?

@Tristian Wolf ahh yeah honey locust are tasty they’re similar for sure! Black locust I think the bean may be used in bean gum but the flowers are delicious but only before they open. Once you see the stamen they don’t have the same sweet smell.

Definitely a tasty fruit and great nutrition. I think people call it an invader or invasive plant because it comes from Asia, grows quickly, have evergreen leaves in an environment where most plants go dormant for winter, and as a result it will shade out native plants. It outcompetes spicebush (super medicinal and amazing plant), pawpaw, elderberry, native bay plants, alders, blueberries, and more. And then there are the hundreds of herbal plants that die back each year both annual and perennial or biennial that are completely wiped out when Eleagnus grows in dense stands. This is because no plants have evolved in Georgia to have large evergreen leaves that also stay low to the ground and grow prolifically. When you walk in a park you'll notice thousands of these particular plants and very few other shrubs or herbs struggling to eek it out. When a plant takes sun all winter and shades the ground in the spring it basically ensures no herbs will grow, which are also medicinal and useful like the wild mustards, wild strawberries, blueberries, deerberries, that you don't tend to see in Atlanta and definitely never when these plants are growing. So while it is a wonderful and helpful plant in it's own way, and tasty, and medicinal, and certainly in its native environment, in Georgia it basically sets up and outcompetes hundreds of other plants that have amazing uses that you won't get to experience if you don't at least remove some of the plants. I also highly recommend going to Shirley Miller wildflower trail to see what I'm talking about. It's an amazing place with all native plants and the diversity of edible and medicinal plants is out of this world. Many plants are endangered or live only there because it is kept with native plants and invasive plants are removed or prevented from establishing by how isolated it is from the city. So I forage and eat these berries and I always bite the seeds, but I also pull hundreds of them out of the parks but I plant hundreds of useful native plants so that the species that co evolved with the insects, birds, and other animals and mushrooms can also live here instead of going extinct by being crowded out of their habitat.

I've taken the ripe red berries and put them into vinegar and they're actually really neat for turning white vinegars into a dark red color. These plants are also non native and sadly spread and outcompete a lot of native plants. So you can harvest as much as you want. They also contain Berberine which some people are using medicinally but I do know it has cholesterol lowering effects. Barberries tend to be the tastier way to get that compound. Too much berberine is associated with diarrhea symptoms so I keep the berries low and especially the bark or roots which are a neon yellow.