Wednesday -- Around the Yard

There is at least one plant that is putting on a show in spite of the hot, dry weather: a hibiscus. Too bad the blooms only stay pretty for one day. I've been saving clean water from the kitchen to put around it since it is prone to wilt in the heat of the day.

The pecan tree is heavily infested with web worms; I do believe this is about the worst I have ever seen it. We've always thought of this as being a sure sign of dry conditions, so maybe that's why they are so bad. While walking beneath the branches, I could hear their droppings hitting the ground and my head! What a life!! Reproduce, eat, ????, and die. Apparently the worms leave the web during the daytime to eat and return at night. A pesticide-free way to get rid of them is to cut the web from the infested stems and dispose of them. That wouldn't be too practical here on such high branches.

In this picture, the brownish glob, just to the upper right of the green spot, is a colony of worms which have just hatched out. In the past I have sprayed the worms at this stage while they are low enough to reach. The worms usually aren't fatal to the trees they infest, but in dry weather the trees can be stressed. For some reason, there are no pecans on the tree this year; neither mulberries nor wild cherries have fruits. We don't recall having temperatures low enough to freeze the fruits last spring. Poor crows and squirrels -- they'll have to look somewhere else for fall and winter food supplies.