August

Are Brown Leaves falling off your Maple, oak, crabapples, or dogwoods?  Black spots, brown curling leaf edges are the symptoms of various fungi that attacked your trees during the past wet spring.  Now it’s too late for control except for raking up the leaves and disposing them.  Do not place them in your compost pile, as the disease will over winter, instead bury them. Note which trees were especially susceptible to these fungi, you may want to consider a fungicide application on them next spring.

Brown needles on evergreen trees such as spruce, hemlock, arborvitae and juniper may be s sign of spider mites.  It’s easy to check, tap a sample branch on a sheet of white paper.  If mites are present, tiny dots can be seen moving across the paper.  A safe control with a force-full spray of water from a garden hose, repeated regularly will dislodge enough of the mites to prevent significant damage to your trees.

August is also the time we start seeing the fall web worm building their nests out on the ends of tree and shrub branches ( the spring web worm usually nests in the crotches of trees).  Although unsightly, they are not really hurting the tree through defoliation as the growing season is now starting to end.  If you really must, remove by hand or prune out just what is nest.  Do not try to burn out the nest as this will also burn the bark of the tree, resulting in death to that area of the tree.

Check your landscape for wasp and hornet activity before your start pruning or shearing trees and shrubs.  Wasps and hornets start becoming really aggressive this time of year.

The heat of July, and the dryness so far of this August are stressing lawns, if you haven’t already, raise the mowing height of your lawn mower to 2.5” – 3”.  Mowing at this height will also discourage weeds from growing.

Got some room in your garden? Now is the time to plant fall harvest crops like cauliflower, brussel sprouts, spinach, Swiss chard, kale and lettuce.