Wednesday, July 6, 2011

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.





8 comments:

  1. I love those hibiscus. I have one the same color and I wish they would stay in bloom longer too. I know what you mean about those worms, but your is about the worst I've ever seen. I despise them..Susie

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  2. We had a year when the web worms just took over everything Charlotte. It was awful.
    We are definitely hot and dry, but we don't have web worms so far. Maybe it's too awful even for them!
    The hibiscus are lovely.

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  3. My hibiscus is the same color! Thankfully I have water from my rain barrel to use on mine. They do seem to take a lot of water, but those blooms are magnificent.

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  4. I have one tree high up that has the web worms, I am keeping an eye on it as I don't want then to spread. WE had some mulberries but not near as many as usual - so dry, I can't keep up with watering plants my water bill was triple than normal this last time (no farm of course) but it was high and I don't want it to go much higher.
    Karen
    http://karensquilting.com/blog/

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  5. It seems to be one of those years that will be lean all around. There are no beans on either my green beans or pintos. Or course I got them planted late because of all the rain early on, so that probably has something to do with it.

    The only thing that seems to be thriving is careless weeds!

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  6. I love hibiscus. I really like the color of yours.
    We've had lots of storms here lately and I'm sad because one of my little apple trees was taken out by one of them. It had just started to produce apples for us.

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  7. your flowers are very pretty. I'm so sorry about your pecan tree, we call those tent worms. They usually get on fruit trees up here. Two springs ago my husband's step dad's apple trees were infested with them. They were all over the tree trunk, too, just like yours. When we were little we used to throw rocks up into them.

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