Need some help saving a big tree...

[SDarkRage]

Wow, good info! We had our house built 2 years ago. They planted a pin oak and put a big mulch ring around it. Wish I had known sooner, I would have pulled all the mulch away. Will be doing that tomorrow for certain now. Also, I will be looking into doing the fertilizer rings as recommended in the article on chlorosis. I will be calling the extension office to see about soil testing. I don't want to lose the pin oak, I love those trees!

 

[Hobbes]

I'm going to throw this out even though it is probably way off.

Does your natural gas line run near the troubled trees?

I heard a piece on NPR a while back about how many home owners had experienced dead or dying shrubs and trees from pinhole leaks that develop in 40 year old natural gas lines.
They said one of the main ways to diagnose leaking ng lines is dying shrubs and trees nearby.

I rembered it because at my old house I had a very large Althea shrub that was sentimental to me that suddenly died one year and after the NPR piece I remembered:
The ng line to my neighbors house ran right by that shrub.

Junior Bonner is a wise man and I listen to his advice every time.

 

[rickm]

There is a fungus going around killing oak trees in the last 3 years i have had to remove a dozen or more 100+ y/o oaks now if this is whats wrong with urs i cant say but u can get with ur county extension office and see if they will come out and look at it.

 

[Lurker66]

That would explain this maybe. Hit last year.

 

[tRidiot]

Interesting ideas. The gas line does run nearby, but none of the other plants around it or near the meter are having any problems. Although I know that doesn't rule it out.

Mold/fungus is something I've thought about, although there is no evidence of it on the non-dead parts of the tree, at least that we could see, or the guys climbing to trim could see.

Definitely going to call the extension office. It would be tragic to lose this tree, although I could do without all the dead leaves... but we shall see. Thanks for all the good ideas. One other one the tree guy threw out was possibly a lightning strike that we didn't know about.

 

[TerryMiller]

Definitely get experts. While it may not be related, the mobile home site where we just moved from had two big Oak trees near our RV. After a storm one day, I looked out to see one of the two closely growing trees on the ground. Come to find out, it had begun to rot on the inside and became too weak for the winds. Our landlady decided to have the other one cut down since we were where it would hit us if it went down. Sure enough, that tree was also rotting inside.

If I remember right, both of those trees had some dead limbs, but not near as bad as Lurker's photo.

My blog entry about the trees: Slight Change to the Neighborhood

 

[Boehlertaught]

There's a nasty thing called hypeloxin canker (sp?) that is killing lots of oak trees around my place. It tends to attack mature trees more than young trees. The Coweta OSU extension looked at our trees and diagnosed the fungus. OSU said all oak have the fungus but become really vulnerable to it when stress issues get to the trees. And the last two summers have been a key to triggering an outbreak. OSU said to keep the trees watered and fed. Feeding is regular fertilizer like 10-20-10...not a high nitrogen fertilizer. Also, oaks don't like change. Landscaping around oaks and covering the ground around their trunks can smother their roots. Good luck.

 

[SoonerBorn]

It's called tree borers. Your tree is toast.


Sent from my meh, using my meh.

 

[Podman]

I went to a friends house for the 4th of July and he said he's lost 30 or 40 of his trees from the fungus that's going around. I remember a few years back
something killed off all the elm trees. Seems like something is always going around killing things. But nothing seems to stop the red cedars or whatever
they are called! Guess we will have to get used to them for our trees now.