Lawn Talk with Harold Enger - Podcast Transcription
Episode: Tree & Shrub Care
Tim Kauffold: Welcome to Lawn Talk, I'm your host Tim Kauffold.
Lawn Talk is a series of conversations with Spring-Green lawn care professionals.
Joining me is Harold Enger. Harold has worked in the Green Industry for nearly 30 years and is a Certified Turfgrass and Ornamental Landscape professional.
In today's episode, we're discussing the importance of tree and shrub care. Harold, one of the first things I want to ask as we get into this subject is do I really need to worry about taking care of landscape plants or are they going to be okay on their own?
Harold Enger: For the most part landscape plants are able to handle most insect and disease that they may come in contact, but remember that most of these plants are not native to the site that they are being planted in. They are probably coming from another part of the country, so it's not native to where you are planting it. And they are going to need some special care because of that.
The other part is landscape plants are expensive. If you have every put in, ah, you know had landscaping done it's not uncommon for landscape to cost 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars, so you would want to spend the time in an essence of like an insurance policy to keep those plants from becoming infested with an insect or being damaged by a disease.
Tim: And what kind of applications would my Spring Green professional apply to my landscape?
Harold: We go through a variety of different methods. The most common is to foliar spray with insect and disease control materials to control things that—you know like surface feeding insects, sucking insects, some of the boring insects and also the leaf diseases that can affect a of trees like powdery mildew is one of the more common leaf diseases or some of the leaf spots like on crab apples. People often lose their trees, their trees lose all their leaves unless they are treated appropriately in the spring with a disease control material in the early spring. We do a lot of foliar spraying.
Then we also do some injection. We use a tool called a wedgle that actually we inject the project into the trunk of the tree. And this will put the material, whether it's an insect or disease control into that cambian layer—that vascular system of the plant—and then it is moved or translocated up into the plant, into the tree, to control maybe a sucking insect or some of the boring insects when the insect, the adult, will bore through the trunk into the tree they will ingest some of this material and then die because of that.
And the third method that we use is that we actually root feed the material. We include with the fertilizer in the fall we inject into the ground and again it is moved up through the root system and moved throughout the plant. Especially this is good for large trees.
Tim: You mentioned that a lot of these treatments can help control boring insects. And I wonder there is the particularly nasty Emerald Ash Borer. Can Spring Green help keep that under control?
Harold: Yes we can. There has been a lot of good work done using different control methods for Emerald Ash Borer and we do have a program where we will actually inject it into the trunk or we can do it through a root feed into the plant that will keep these insects from going into the plant to lay their eggs for the larvae to start feeding on the inside of the tree, actually it feeds right on the surface, underneath the bark, and these materials will help keep the Emerald Ash Borer larva from developing inside the tree.
Now if the tree is heavily infested, there is usually nothing you can do for it, but if you are in an area that is prone for Emerald Ash Borer, doing injections as a preventative to keep them from coming in is a very good process.
Tim: If all the trees and shrubs in the landscape are particularly mature, and the trees have gotten tall, is there any special treatment for this kind of plant?
Harold: Well the two things that I mentioned before are very advantageous. The root feed, where we put the material into the soil and then it moved up through the tree through the root system, or the injection and there are different types of materials or different methods that we do. There is a cost difference on some of those, depending on what you are trying to treat for, but we try to use the best method that's going to give you results.
And our program generally starts off with a dormant oil application in the spring that puts down a very thin, lightweight oil, like a mineral oil type of material on the plant. What this will do is suffocate any overwintering adults and cover up the egg masses to control them that way.
And then we will also do a spring root feed. We do have one program that we will add in the spring, a product called a mycorrhizae, which is actually a fungus that will grow on the root hairs and what this fungus will do is help those root hairs grab nutrients and water and so forth from the surrounding soil. It's what's called colonizing the roots and it's a very good process. We've had very good results using this mycorrhizae in the spring.
And then we start through a series of treatments for disease and insect control depending on what's going on at that time of year. It is mainly preventative, but there are going to be some curative advantages. Insects don't all germinate at the same time and diseases don't become active at the same time, so you need to do this on a successive basis—oh about every four weeks we do applications—up to the end of the summer.
And then when we get to the fall, then we do a fall root feed after the tree has begun to go dormant or begin to drop their leaves where actually the flow of material is now going back down instead of going back up to feed the leaves. The material is going down so that the root system can absorb this material and develop a better root system, therefore be a healthier plant the following year. So that's the program.
Tim: If you would like to know more about services available from your local Spring-Green lawn care professional, visit the Spring-Green web site, at Spring-Green.com. There you will find more detailed information, including how to contact a Spring-Green lawn care professional in your area.