While driving I passed a planting of roses that did not appear normal. Up close I saw that the plants were heavily infested with spider mites. The foliage and stems had a rusty red color and were covered with fine webs. The variety of roses appeared to be Knockouts, which are advertised as very resistant to insects.

While I was diagnosing why trees were dying at one Deale home, a neighbor complained of the loss of a flowering cherry. The tree had flowers very heavily last year, then died this spring.     A quick examination of the dead trunk showed that tree trunk borers had killed the tree.

Contractors are notorious for planting what horticulturists call trash trees and shrubs around new housing developments. The plants they select are fast-growing, cheap and can be guaranteed to live for at least one year after they have been planted.     The trees most commonly used are silver maple, weeping willow, mimosa, Lombardy poplar and white willow. They grow fast, provide quick shade and make the house more appealing at the time of purchase.

 

Squirrels, rabbits, ground hogs and deer are a common problem in home vegetable gardens. I surround my garden with a four-foot-high four-inch-by-two-inch turkey fence supported by steel fence posts at 10-foot intervals. I also attach an 18-inch-wide pullet fence at the bottom with hog-nose rings. Groundhogs will not climb the turkey fence with the bottom pullet fence. They try but fall backwards because the pullet fence is loosely attached. The bottom edge is buried two to three inches deep to discourage the ground hogs from digging under.

Crows, morning doves, pigeons and black birds love to pluck sprouting seeds of corn, snap beans and lima beans in the garden. Robins love to eat strawberries, while mocking birds and brown thrush love to eat blueberries as they ripen. Birds can also do a great deal of damage to maturing sweet corn. They will rip away the husks and silk and peck out the kernels from the tops of the ears.     How to deter them?

Making compost in a drum composter is very different from making compost in a bin on the surface of the ground. When you’re composting in a bin on the ground, any excess water drains from the compost into the ground. Any moisture released in the air surrounding the pile is quickly disbursed by wind and air currents.     Composting drums have vents, but most of the moisture released during decomposition condensates on the surface and drops back into the composting materials. As temperatures increase, more water is carried by the warm air.

A Bay Weekly reader complains that her apple trees have not produced any fruit during the five years that she has had them in her garden. All five, she told me, are of the same variety: golden delicious trees. She was told that for the trees to produce fruit, she needed to plant more than one tree. Since her preference was for Golden Delicious, that is what she purchased and planted.

I recently received photographs of dead and dying plants along with soil test results sent by a Bay Weekly reader. The reader had sent numerous plant samples to a university for analysis only to be told that the injury was due to a fungus. As I studied the photographs, I could not identify a fungus that would cause such symptoms, so I requested a complete soil analysis.

On a Saturday morning garden show, a caller was advised to plant long-stemmed tomato plants deep. Supposedly, burying the stems deep in the garden soil forces the plant to produce new roots along the stem, resulting in a stronger plant. I strongly disagree.