 get started by meeting our plant doctor here. And I think we've all been in this situation where I've gone out to the backyard and we've seen a sick plant, right? So what is the best treatment to give a sick plant? I want to pause on that. Whatever you thought, the answer is wrong. Wow, I'm tough. That's because the best thing you can give your plant is your shadow. How about that? Profound gardening tip. Zen garden here. Give your plant your shadow because that means you're giving your plant your attention. But then once you give your plant your shadow, you have to know how to diagnose the problem. And that's why we have Steve Saggiser. He is a horticulture agent in Grand Forks County. Steve has diagnosed thousands of cases of plant disorders and tonight he's going to share with us his tips for diagnosing plant problems. So let's welcome Steve to the forum. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Tom and thank you gardeners all across the state and Tom did say that I could do a shameless plug and infomercial for our April 11th gardening Saturday program. So if you don't have this in your hands, go to your favorite search engine, type in gardening Saturday and you will come to our website and we will send you this brochure and you can print off your very own copy to get registered and signed up. And here's the important information you need to know. Take this down. You can save yourself $10 folks by registering before Thursday night. 5 p.m. or actually midnight Thursday night because after Thursday night it's going to cost you $50 to hear P. Allen Smith. And if you don't know who P. Allen Smith is, don't raise your hand. I don't want to know but we'll educate you on April 11th. So anyway, this is about gardening Saturday. We have four sessions, one general session with P. Allen Smith. The other three sessions are going to be taught by gardening neighbors just like yourselves. There will be nine separate classes going on at once and you'll have an opportunity to hear about tons of information gardening related topics for our area right here. So keep that in mind April 11th and that's where I cut off my infomercial and let's start talking about one of my favorite topics and that's diagnosing plants, plant diseases and plant problems. And so last night we talked about a lot of the same things that I'm going to be talking about tonight and I did a great segue for leading into my talk tonight. So thank you guys for the way you put this together, Tommy. You've done an awesome job and it's going to continue to get better and better. And I just want to make a shout out to my gardening friends in Grand Forks and Grand Forks County. Thanks you guys for being there and let's get talking about gardening and about diagnosing plant problems. So the first thing you want to do is be able to get the advanced or to work properly and so you want to know, I think we got the wrong PowerPoint up here but I'll work with this. This is my handout one as opposed to the one I gave you. So this is what your handout is going to look like and I'm going to go right from this. Last night you heard Todd talk about his list of these and so I put together a list of these for you guys too as well. And these are my diagnosing these and it's being a good detective. If you're going to diagnose plant problems, you've got to be a good detective. And then you also have to be very observant. If you're not observant, you're going to miss those little clues. And you also have to be a good listener and you also have to be very open minded because what your plant's problems are might be caused by a multitude of problems. And you also have to think about multiple causes. So you have to be open minded until all the facts are collected. Does anybody remember that old Colombo detective show? There was always, crime was always solved with that one last question he asked. Well you have to be your personal version of Colombo if you're going to diagnose plant problems appropriately. Then you need your diagnosing toolkit or your detective kit. You'll have to have some things like a sharp knife. You got to have a sharp knife. You should have a camera. Now for a lot of us that's going to be your cell phone. Cell phones can take some awesome pictures and you can get them to the plant diagnostic lab a lot quicker with that. You should actually have a really good hand lens. Now if you go on campus here, you can pick up a really nice hand lens at the book store. You should have a nice side cutting pruning shears. You want to have a good pruning shears and you should have a good source of references. So some good books. You'll need some good books. One book does not do it all. Then you want to have a little tablet, electronic tablet, an iPad or something like that. You can take pictures. You can jot notes down and you certainly should have a piece of paper and a pencil to write some of your observations down as well. Then you need to know what questions to ask. And sometimes you just don't know where to start. Let's start out with common names. Common names cause a lot of confusion and you heard Greg talking about that last night. Somebody says I've got this evergreen that's got a problem. So what's an evergreen? Is it a conifer? Greg made a point of talking about conifers last night. Is it a deciduous conifer, like a larch? Or is it one that keeps its needles on your around? Is it a fruit tree? Is it a shade tree? Somebody calls you up and says I've got a sick tree in my backyard. Well then you've got to play 20 questions trying to figure out what kind of tree it is. And so you should be using Latin names if you're going to be serious about diagnosing plant problems. Because there, if you're using Latin names, somebody in Tokyo or somebody in Siberia or somebody in South America knows you're talking about a green ash. When you say I've got a fraction of Pennsylvania that's having some problems. I've been practicing that all night long and I still stumbled on it. That's the extent of my Latin knowledge. Now let's look around the yard and see what's happened. What's changed recently? Has there been some construction? Did somebody use some fertilizers or pesticides? These are just some general questions you have to ask. Has there been some mulch applied? Was it inorganic or organic? And why is that important? Well, a lot of times when people plant, put mulch down, they'll dig up the sod. And when they dig up the sod around the tree or shrub, they might cause some root damage. Or maybe that mulch has some residue left over from a herbicide or some other type of pesticide. Is there standing water? Has there been standing water? Is there a construction grade change that's been made? If you live in an area where there's been a lot of new homes built, but there were some old trees there, a shelter built that people wanted to maintain and keep some of those trees alive, a lot of times contractors will throw three, six, eight, ten, twelve inches of soil over the top of those root systems. Folks, that's not going to fly. Those trees might look good for a year or two, but in time, no more than five years, those roots aren't going to get the oxygen they need and those trees will start to succumb. You cannot raise the grade around the tree or shrub or practically any kind of plant more than an inch and a half or two inches. So if there's been a construction grade change, that's something to think about. Now let's just say that somebody got a new garden tiller and they want to see just how deep that sucker will go. What they're going to do is they're going to run that right down to the ground next to an evergreen tree and if they're going more than three or four inches deep, they're tearing up roots. So that's something to think about if there's been some soil cultivation. Not all soil cultivation is bad, but if you go too deep, it can be hazardous to the plant's health. What kind of pruning has been done? Somebody got a new string trimmer and they've been working around the evergreen trees or any kind of a tree and girdled it. I saw an entire row of evergreen trees in a cemetery that were all dying from about the second rank of branches on up. When I got close and I looked at it, I saw where somebody had been doing some string trimmer down. It was a string trimmer working there and they girdled every single one of their evergreen trees. They all had to be torn out and replanted. Mowers, of course, we've all heard about mower blight. That's from banging your mower into the tree over and over again. That's another thing to be aware of. How long has the plant been in its current location? Well, if it's been recently transplanted or planted, obviously it's not going to be lush and full and looking really super healthy. Was it bald and burlaped? Was it container-grown? Was it potted? Was it bare root? Why are those important questions to ask? Well, if it was bare root, nine times out of ten, the person that planted those roots well, if he did it appropriately or correctly, he would have spread them out and given them room to expand. He might even nip the roots off a little bit to increase some root growth. If it was container-grown, there's a very good chance that when it was planted, they just plopped it into the ground and didn't separate the roots out. Those roots started to go all around and before you know it, you got a girdling choking effect going on and that will take place after four or five years. And you can see on this slide over here what happens when you have a girdling root situation taking place. Well, there's some other things to be aware of. What's been the recent culture? When was the problem first noticed? What is the age of the plant? If it's a five-year-old plant or if it's a 50-year-old plant, you need to know that. And is it a group of trees and there's one tree in the middle that's affected? Or is it all of the trees? Well, there's some things to think about. And just tell us, severe is the damage. When we see, some people tend to be a little bit overly concerned about the health of their plants and what happens is they'll see a big leaf here, a dead branch there. And the first question is what can I spray on it? And when you tell them you could spray something on it, if you insist on it, then they want to put twice as much on. So, assess how severe the damage is. More often than not, the damage is not that severe and your plant basically can deal with it. Now, what was the recent culture? How was it planted? Have there been pesticides and fertilizers used recently? Has it received regular water? If it hasn't been receiving regular water and it's a plant that needs that, obviously it's not going to continue to grow very well. And what's the soil like? Now, we have regions in our state and even around the area where I'm from in Grand Forks where the soil tends to be a little bit sodic, a little high in alkalinity. You're not going to grow plants that love and acid soil in an area where your pH of your soil is leaving residues of salt all over the soil surface. You can still grow things there, but you're more than likely going to have to do it and raise beds of some sort. What's the weather been like? Now, if we've got our apricot trees all doing beautifully and they're all leafed out in the blossoming, then we have a frost-like situation developed in, let's say, a mid-may or something. Well, you can expect to see leaves looking like this. Now, this is actually an ash tree and that probably occurred sometime in May or possibly even June, but if the weather, if you had a frost situation take place, well, you need to be aware of what's happened. So, that's not a disease, it's not an disease. That's weather-related. And then dry weather, obviously, that can lead to some wilting and we are in a dry condition right now. And fall type weather can cause problems for you the following spring. If you've got rose bushes that are just growing like crazy, if you've over-fertilized them and they don't want to slow down and hard not properly, what's going to happen? They're going to continue to grow and then as the weather does finally plummet in those branches freeze, they're going to be soft and succulent and they're going to die and in the following spring they're going to say, what the heck happened to my rose tree? Or my rose bush? This can happen to other kinds of trees as well. I've seen lilacs start blossoming in September because the weather's been so mild. That's just kind of an aberration, but it does happen. So, mild weather in the fall, a lot of excess moisture, maybe a fertilized after July or something, that can trigger too much growth in the fall and cause problems for you the following spring. And of course, Greg talked about this last night, dry fall weather may cause sunscales on certain types of evergreen trees. And if you guys remember last night, what kind of evergreen tree did he say we shouldn't be planting around here? Fog quiz here. Furs, remember? He said you're not supposed to be planting furs. Now, balsam fir maybe, but not true furs. Because of what? They get sunscaled. Look for symptoms now. Let's talk about symptoms. Symptoms could be slow growth. Look at the inner node. If you've got a short distance between one node and the next one, if you've got maybe three to six inches of growth there where you should be expecting 10 to 12 inches of growth, something's going on on the root system. On the other hand, if you've got extremely long growth between the nodes and you're expecting only three or six inches, maybe it's a process, maybe it's something like over fertilization took place. Look for abnormal growth like twisted galls, cankers, and blisters. Those are things to be aware of, dead plant parts. Mosaic patterns oftentimes mean there's some sort of a virus that's causing a problem for you. And then look for signs. Now, signs and symptoms are different. If you remember anything, remember that. With signs, you're looking for insects present. Insects feeding on leaves, you can't find a much better sign than that. Look for insect frass. Look for mice. Look for webbing. And look for fruiting bodies. If you're dealing with the spruce like Greg talked about last night in Colorado, you'll want to get your hand lens. And I'll show you some pictures of signs in a few minutes of fruiting bodies of rhizosphere and stigmina. And also powdery mildew. And if you have a cucumber that potentially is suffering, it's kind of wilty and everything, do a little bacterial ooze check on that. And then you need to know the plant's normal appearance. So if this is a normal looking tree for you, I guess that's okay. But typically speaking, plants are going to have unique characteristics. You need to know what their characteristics are. And if the plant's appearance is different from the normal appearance, then that's something to be concerned about. So you need to know what a healthy plant looks like in order to recognize an unhealthy plant. Now, the reason I put this slide in here is these plants typically would look identical except one should have yellow foliage and one should have yellow or green foliage. So a fruible spirea should have green foliage, but it's still going to have pink blossoms. Otherwise the leaf shape, characteristics, everything else is pretty much the same. But for the unpracticed eye, you may think that the one with the green foliage is sick. It looks a little meany. So you understand that that's just natural and normal appearance. Now the plant's normal appearance, if you see red leaves on a Norway maple in the summertime, you've got something going on that's not healthy for that plant. It could be some sunscroll damage. It could be practical anything. But if you see red leaves on a sugar maple in the fall, that is normal. That's what it's supposed to do. So look for different types of leaf shapes, the difference in colorations, look for injury to the bark, stem, and trunk, and also think about the season of the year. Now here's another situation where you've got common elderberry in the summertime. Golden elder is Sambukis canondensis aurea. Aurea means gold. It should look yellow in the summertime. On the other hand, common elderberry, that's not aurea, should look green in the summertime. So if you know that that's a landscape plant and it's looking yellow like that, and it's elder, it's very likely that it's the aurea, or golden elder. What we call Canada red cherry oftentimes is confused and it's actually Schubert choked cherry. That should have green foliage beginning in the summer, but by mid-summer the foliage should be purple. On the other hand, if it's just common choked cherry and it's not the cult of our Schubert, then it should have green leaves all summer long. So those are some things, again, that you need to be aware of what kind of plant you're dealing with. We talked about Larch last night. Larch is a deciduous, help me out here, starts with a C, con fir. Okay, so that means that in the summertime it's going to look like a conifer. In the fall it should look like that, but in the winter time it looks like it's dead. It's not dead though, is it? In the spring it will look like it does over on the left hand, on your left hand screen again. Ponderosa pine, folks, every fall I get calls from folks saying, my pine tree is dying. And I say, let me guess, are the needles falling off? Yeah. Does it have a nice bit of needles underneath it? Yeah. They talked about the importance of a nice bit of needles under the tree did they? They said, don't break those needles off. Okay, what's happening is in the Ponderosa pines, they lose their 3 year old needles every year. That's normal for them. A lot of pines do that. Spruce do that as well, but they're not needles that are that old. Some are 5 years up to 7 years old. So that's normal for that tree. Then, let's talk about defining the problem. So some of the living factors that can cause problems for your trees, shrubs, and other types of plants are insects, mites, rodents, you know, anything up there like that. Even humans are not living factors of the weather, wind, light, any kind of a weather situation in mechanical breakings like from construction, from backcalls, pesticides, fertilizers, winter deicers. I'm going to show you a really cool picture in a few minutes of what winter deicers can do. And then, how extensive is the problem? Is it really serious? If it's a tomato hornworm and you have a huge infestation of tomato hornworms, you've got big time problems. But you can get it with your kids, your grandkids, and pick them off and pretend like you're online and say, oh, it's a little greenfield kind, pop one in your mouth, or you can continue just to throw them somewhere or squish them and make an awesome squishy sound. But generally speaking, tomato hornworms aren't a very heavy infestation. Not anything to worry about. But on the flip side of that, you've got a leafmine on your tomato plant. Why worry about it? It's not going to cause that much of an issue. So don't be too concerned about that. Sometimes it just doesn't matter. Define the problem. But if you're trying to grow cactus in areas that are swampy, it's just not going to work. So you need to know what the soil conditions are like. If you're trying to grow a weeping willow in a sandy situation, they like a wet soil, it's not going to work. So make sure that you're using the plants or the plants are where they're supposed to be growing. Think about flooding and drought, and we talked about herbicide applications, and we'll talk about that in just a few minutes more. Here's what I want to have you do is look for patterns. Now you should all be able to see that, and I'm kind of looking over here at the screen, but you see the way the grass kind of bends out around that brown tree there? This is a home visit I made several years ago, and the husband was nowhere to be found, but the wife told me what she thinks happened. You see how nice and clean it is? There isn't the grass, piece of grass or a weed anywhere? Well it seems as though he over applied a little bit of roundup there, and that's an indicator right there when it's nice and clean. Maybe some herbicide has been applied, but where the dog is kind of sniffing there, that tree got a big whiff of roundup, or glyphosate of some sort, and you can see the trees a little bit beyond it, and a little bit to the left of it weren't harmed, and nearly as bad, but that's a pattern you look for. If you see an individual tree, maybe it's roundup or some other herbicide, maybe it's not, but if you see sort of a pattern there that's something to be aware of. Other patterns, this is a homeowner that lives next to a golf course, and a green skipper with a little ambitious, one windy day with some herbicide, and you can see how on the picture on the right is burned all up and down on one side. That's a clear pattern. That tells you that wasn't an insect or a disease. That's something that happened probably from a herbicide injury or damage. And now this, again, this is a random pattern here. You can see that tree in the center on the lower right hand, on the lower left hand picture there, and when I looked at these, I got up close, I called underneath them, and I saw all of this sap coming down, and I took some pictures, and I sent them into the diagnostic lab, and they positively identified it for Zinnerman pine moth, and all of the trees weren't infested. It was just the one in the center, and one or two of the ones off to the left. So, again, you do need to do a little bit of detective work there. Now, if you see something like this taking place where insects are actually chewing away, that's a pretty good indication that they're the ones that are causing the problems. If you see leaves that look like you can hold them up to the light and see right through them, you might have a leaf minor situation taking place where there are tiny little worms cleaning out the differences with the food between the surfaces of the leaves, and if you see leaves rolled up, there's a good indication that could be a leaf roller, but it could also be something like physiological leaf roller we see sometimes in some of our plants. Tomatoes, for example. Japanese beetle, I don't want to be a fatalist, I don't want to be an alarmist, but we better face reality folks. They love 300 different kinds of plants. Three of my favorites are basswood, roses, and grapes, and I'm afraid they might be here. I'm not trying to say that they are, but we have to be aware of them. They can cause a lot of damage in a short time. And that's Japanese beetle having their way with that rose blossom there. Emerald ash borer, I don't want to sound like this is something that's inevitable, but it probably is. Emerald ash borers are weak flyers on their own. They can't move much more than about a quarter mile under their own power, but how do they get spread around? People go to the lake, they take their dead ash tree firewood with them, and they spread it from one lake to the other. So be aware of that. That's another damage, that's more damage caused by living factors. Pretty soon we're going to get to some of the fun ones where it's damage caused by non-living factors, but if you see some holes in the trunk of a tree like that, it could be borers, but chances are it's going to be something like a yellow-bellied stop-secker. If you see something that looks like it's popcorn strewn up and down a maple, well, chances are it's a scale insect of some sort, probably cottony maple scale. If you see sucking insects, they'll cause stippling and puckering on leaves, that's something else to be aware of, and mites and thrips will do that. Now, if I was an aphid eating insect, I would just tickle the look at this slide, because it tells me that there's aphids that come in strawberry, aphids that come in chocolate, and you can probably even find a lime and chellil aphid there. So there is a lot of aphids that you have to be aware of. And this potentially could have been herbicide drift, and that's what I thought it was. I thought it was possibly a disease. I got up close, I took some leaf snapples, and I had to stick these under a microscope, and I saw that little bitty leaf hopper down in the lower right-hand corner there, and they're sucking the living juice right out of those leaves of that Virginia creeper. Why is that important to know? Well, if you went out there, and I accused your neighbor of spraying herbicide, and he didn't, then you're going to feel kind of silly if you didn't do your detective work. Other living factors are spider mites. Spider mites thrive, and it's hot and dry. You don't have to spray anything on them. In fact, it's best if you don't. Just spray them down with some water. That will do a good job of washing them off. And typically, they reproduce so fast that you're not going to spray anything on them and keep your plants cleaned up anyway. Just be aware that they're there. European fruit-lecanium scale, as you see in the lower left-hand corner, they masquerade as buds on your trees. Now you've seen a lot of these in Grand Forks over the years. I've actually seen trees come from them because they're in an otherwise weakened state, and you get them sucking the juice out of the foliage, and therefore you don't have enough material left to manufacture sugars for the plant, and consequently, your plants start to decline. One year isn't an issue, but after four or five or six years of that, and if the tree otherwise is neglected, you could see trees dying from that. And I've seen them on ash trees. I've seen them on basswoods. You name it. They're not all that fussy, but they hatch about mid-June, and that would be the time to try to take care of them. And so the scale crawlers are kind of hard to see, but if you've got younger eyes and mind, you can sometimes see them fairly easily. Otherwise, get out your hand lids and that's what they'll look like down there in that lower right-hand corner. This tree we heard about last night. It's a fat Albert spruce, the one on the left there, and the one on the right is a Meyer spruce. You heard about that as well. The symptoms look alike, but actually what's going on there on the left is that's an insect causing that damage. And when I first looked at it, I thought, these are the funniest looking buds ever. There's actually spruce bud scale. And again, those scale insects suck the juice out of the foliage. On the flip side of that, the spruce on the right, that's a needle cast disease on Meyer spruce, another one of the ones we heard about last night. So even though these symptoms look alike, you can never assume unless it's the same thing unless you've done your detective work. In order to have a disease, you have to have the disease triangle. There are three parts to the disease triangle. You have to have all three of these in order to have a disease. This is what I call the Master Gardener disease triangle because it's so much more colorful than that just basic disease triangle that a lot of pathologists like to use. So you have to have a susceptible host. If you don't have a green ash you're not going to, let's say that your host is a green ash. If you don't have that tree, it doesn't matter if you've got cool wet rainy conditions in the spring or if you've got fungi floating around that can cause ash anthracnose. So you've got to have all three of those combined in order to have a problem. So that's your disease triangle. Kind of remember that. There will be a test. Other living factors, fungi, if you look for these concentric rings that you can see up here on the right-hand side of the screen, that's more than likely going to be a tomato early blight if it's on a tomato plant. If you see some of that sort of a wet, water-soaked appearance on a tomato plant and it looks really wealthy like you see on the right-hand side and more right-hand side of the slide, more than likely that's probably going to be tomato late blight. So diseases that you'll have to know what kind of diseases certain plants are susceptible to. Now here's that needle cast slide and Dr. Jim Wall is going to be talking about Stigmata needle cast at Gardening Saturday if you want to hear more about that. But these are some of the signs that you want to be looking for. The fruiting structures up in the upper left-hand corner you see rhizosphere fruiting bodies and the lower right-hand corner you see stigmata needle cast fruiting bodies. And the difference is the stigmata needle cast and fruiting bodies are a little fuzzier. But you need a good solid hand lens to be able to tell that. So we're going to move along a little faster here. Bacteria can be a living factor that causes problems in a fire blight on apple trees or it could be a non-problem if you got bacterial spot on a tomato. Viruses, we haven't talked about them but they can cause some issues for you and there's not a lot you're going to be able to spray on any kind of a plant for viruses. But if you're a smoker don't be smoking out in your garden and there's less chance you'll be spreading tobacco mosaic virus to your tomatoes. Then there are some other living factors. This is a tree by the English Cooley that was girdled by a beaver. And of course if you see damage about two feet off the ground and there's a German shepherd in the neighborhood and the foliage is turning brownish black that's a pretty good indication that that's causing that to happen. This is damage caused by herbicide and you can see the damage where the grass is kind of a lighter color green in that lower left-hand corner. And in the damage on the right-hand side of the spruce tree on the right you'll see who are spray drift has hit that tree. So two different kinds of damage but similar types of trees. Now this is the one I wanted to show you which was de-icer used on a street. The street is running the picture on the left is a close up of the picture on the tree on the right and as you can see the street running down there the street was filled with de-icer and snow and blasted up onto the berm there with a snow plow and you can see the height the pattern established all the way down that row of trees where the foliage is brown. Did that kill the tree? No. Did it kill the trees? No. It did kill that current season's needles but the needles did come back in the new growth that same spring. And car accidents at 2am in the morning can cause problems so you'll have some trunk early going on. We already talked about string trimmers and mowers. If you set your plants out in the spring thinking you're going to harden them off like we're taught to do and you forget to bring them in just what happens they freeze. If you give your plants too much light because they've been in a shady condition all winter long you set them out in the spring they get scorched or sunsculled so that's another issue to be aware of. Greg talked about evergreens not liking water logging or wet soils they really don't and this is the picture from the 97 flooding down back that anchored I thought it was a meat picture of evergreens trying to survive in the flooded condition. But they did survive and you know why? Because they were dormant, the water was cold and it was full of oxygen but if this had happened in the middle of the summertime those trees wouldn't have lasted 2 days. Too much water causes edema on geranium leaves. You get those quirky types of substances and iron deficiency can cause that and properly applied chemicals. A little bit of lack of nutrients. This is a potassium deficiency and a grape leaf and so I'm going to leave you with these 20 questions. This summarizes everything we just talked about. Things to think about when you're diagnosing. First of all, never you got to have the proper name of the plant. What are you diagnosing? Know what a healthy plant looks like. What are some common problems for the plant? What are some common tests for the plant? What do you see that looks abnormal? Is the plant wilting or is it growing too fast? Is part of the plant sick or is it the entire plant? If you've got one stem on Arbivida and it's dead and everything else looks green, it's a good chance you had a mouse down there close to the ground that girdled that stem. So check close to the ground. What are the signs and symptoms? Remember signs and symptoms are separate. Are there other plants in the same location that are sick? Are there other plants, other kinds of plants? If you've got a dog with that's sick and over here you've got a shade tree that's sick and over here you've got something else that's never green that's sick, something is going on in the environment. It's not the same disease or insect causing the same problems for every plant. Who knows about the care and health of the plants? Now somebody's been taking care of those plants. Somebody knows what's going on. That's the person you've got to get a hold of. They may or may not be forthcoming, but you at least got to quiz them a little bit. And when did the symptoms first appear? They already talked about the horticultural history and the environmental history, but ask the client what he or she thinks the problem is. A lot of times it'll be a wife telling on a husband or a husband telling on a wife. A lot of times they'll know what's wrong but they're just trying to get you to confirm it for them. And what diagnostic tools do you need to use? You'll need to use part of your diagnostic your detective toolkit. Decide how you're going to take samples, how you're going to where you're going to send them, and make a diagnosis. You need to diagnose something if you're going to get good at this. Then, if you do get some other outside help from your local extension agent or the plant diagnostic lab, they can confirm it for you and it's a confidence builder for you. And then also, one of the last questions, how serious is it? What's the significance? Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe you should just ignore it and the plant will take care of it itself. Think about some management recommendations. It's too easy to say spray this herbicide, that insecticide, or this fungicide. Maybe there's some management recommendations that you can make to the homeowner and it'll be a whole lot friendlier to the environment and to us as well. And so I'm going to wrap it up there and turn it back to Tom and if you've got some questions I'd be happy to answer them. You've got some questions coming. You are the plant doctor and you do have some clients looking for some free advice. Here's the first question. Stevia was in the 60s and 70s in degrees for a few days in a row. Is it still safe to prune trees now that it's cold again? Okay, can we still prune trees even though we had a weekend of nice weather? Folks, we're in prime pruning condition right now. Now, certain plants, you should maybe stay away from pruning things like porcithia. And you know why? They put out a beautiful flush of flowers pretty soon. And if you start whacking away, you might cut off some of those flowers. Same with your lilacs. You can prune your lilacs. Shoot, you can prune them right down to the ground. What do you grow a lilac flower for? You grow up for those beautiful flush flowers. So wait till some of those spring flowering shrubs are done. Flowering, then go after them. That said, you can prune practically anything right now. Okay, how about this person has a young apple tree and the deer are eating the bark off of it. If they apply a tree wrap now, how much time can they leave it on without damage to the tree? A question. I'm a strong proponent of using tree wrap, but put it on good because it doesn't take much effort by an enterprising rabbit or deer to rub it off. So make sure you put it on good. Put it on in the fall. Leave it on till the lilacs start to swell their buds in the spring and then take it off. You shouldn't have to worry about it after that. On that same topic, I put it on one of my trees and it was an ash tree. The deer rubbed the bark completely around except for about 20% of it. I thought, well, that tree is dead. I didn't get it out of there. So I forgot about it for the year. Came back that following summer and it had lots of beautiful leaves on it. So I thought, well, I'll just ignore it for another year or two. I've never seen this happen, folks. But that tree had almost 75% of its bark missing. And inside of four years, the bark had almost totally grown back around the tree. So hopefully, you could chalk that up to just be in a dead tree. And that will sometimes happen. And you can do a little bit of bridge graphing as well if you want to encourage it along a little bit. What kind of insect will chew a perfect semi-circle out of a climbing rose leaf? Well, that could either be a rose slug, what we referred to as a pear slug, or a leaf cutter bee like we talked about last night. That could be. But what do you do about it? Let it go. Here's a more complicated one for you. You've got a three-year-old Toba Hawthorne. It's got a white, almost frost-appearing powder-like substance on the underside of lower branches on the south side of the tree. It develops in the late summer. And they did the same thing the following summer, late summer. Branches now have a warped and wilted appearance. So a soft powder-like substance on the underside of these branches. Probably Downey Mildew or something of that nature. I'd have to see a sample of it. And that's where I'd make an initial diagnosis, look at all of the things we talked about. Then I would need that confirmed myself by sending it in a sample to the Plant Diagnostic Lab. I think now's a good time to say that Steve and NDSU, we've got a team of people here to help diagnose any of your problems. And we have a beautiful thing called a digital camera. Just go outside, take a photo, and you can send that to your local county extension agent, or you can send it to anybody at the NDSU to help diagnose the problem. That's a great tool that we have that Steve and I didn't have 20 years ago when we started. But it makes such a difference. Digital camera. So this would be a perfect case with that Hawthorne. Take some photos of when you start seeing the disease happen. And most cases, that's enough information that visual evidence to diagnose your problems. So don't forget about that. We're always here, not just at the Spring Fever, we're here all year. And just send us an email with a digital photo, we're ready to help. And here's another one. What might cause one Juneberry plant to set fruit but less than 10% of the fruit stay on while the berries on the other Juneberries stay on the fruit on the tree, on the plant. That is a question I haven't been asked before and I'm not going to even attempt it. That's a Kathy Weederholt question. Possibly some sort of, what would you say, rust? Yeah. A lot of bird was there in the neighborhood. Like you missed a bird. Mommy berries also caused a shriveled up berry. That could be another case. What are we going to do about spruce bud scale? You need to assess how serious the situation is because a lot of times you will have beneficial insects that can eat the scale insects. If it's causing lots of needle drop, then you probably should monitor the scales when they hatch. A lot of scales hatch about mid to late June and when you see them crawling about, that's the time to apply contact insecticide. You could have applied maybe some sort of a systemic insecticide prior to that but I'm not all that much in favor of using systemic insecticides. They do provide almost season long protection but then you have to question, as we got into this discussion last night a little bit about what it may or may not be doing to some of our pollinating insects. I would just monitor it closely and if you see an opportunity, if you see the scale insects crawling about, that would be the time to go ahead and hit them with an insecticide. If the damage is severe enough, if it's not that much damage taking place, I would just ignore it. This person was right, will the scale spread across a tree row? Chances are it will. What do you do for pine wasp? Not familiar with it. I would need more information. Okay. Asian Longhorn Beetle? I need to have a little bit more information. You need to have more intensive consultation on that situation and that brings up a topic that there is interest out there, even in Grand Forks County of all places, Steve, they're begging for hands on classes on diagnosing plant problems. So you're needed back home as soon as possible. Dear, are back at that person's apple tree. Can they put the tree wrap on tonight? Yeah, you can put it on tonight. That's a good way. You need to take the tree wrap off. You should have had it on all this time, but you need to take it on before the new growth starts to grow. I don't care if it's the spiral on tree wrap that's supposed to expand with the tree. I don't care if it's the asphalt based paper material that's not supposed to cause an issue, take that stuff off in the spring. And if it's the permanent stuff that you can use from one year to the next, throw it in the garage and bring it out and fall and put it back on. If it's the paper stuff, throw it away and start with fresh stuff. But do not leave it on in the spring through the growing season into the summer. It's got to come off. As an apple grower myself, I'll just throw in this comment. Maybe use a repellent. Usually an exclusion, a barrier, is the best way to handle wildlife like a hard wear cloth or wrapping. But repellents do work for deer damage. And so what I would do is tomorrow morning or tonight, 8.30 after the forum, go get some liquid fence or a comparable repellent and that does a great job repelling deer. There you go. I got a comment far go, echoes the comments. There you go. So we got a second doctor opinion that supports me. I'm from family and you'll be surprised how effective it is. And the deer will just eat something else to leave your apple tree alone. All the tree wrap does is protect the trunk folks. That doesn't mean they're going to just see the tree wrap and not nip the branches off. You might have an intact trunk that's three feet tall and that's how high your tree wrap is. But all your branches are gone. So repellent, a good product like I like to use plant skid. That's a good product. And so any of those types of blood meal or blood products work good. They're just repulsive to deer and rabbits as well. But they're not permanent either. So you do have to reapply them from time to time. 8 foot tall electrified fence is the best answer. But your neighbor won't appreciate it. How about tomatoes? The bottom of my tomato, tomatoes turn black while they're on the line. Have you heard this one before, doctor? It happened while the tomatoes were both green and red. What causes black on the bottom of a tomato fruit, Steve? It's got to be something like blossom and rot. Yeah, there's some things you can do. Try to water evenly. You might have to add a calcium supplement. Don't cultivate too deeply next to the plant. Those types of things. Try to do consistent with your care on your tomato plants as you can. And a lot of times you just grow right out of that. Some varieties are more susceptible to it than others. But usually speaking, it's just going to be the first fruit. So as we get further along into the direction of season, a lot of that will disappear naturally on its own. Okay, we'll just wrap it up. Someone had a question about this. NDSU would have an app or a website with a flow chart to help in the diagnosis process. Yeah. I have one about diagnosing steps in diagnosing. Maybe that's something that we can work on publishing steps in diagnosing. When you go visit a homeowner, some of the steps you take. Thank you for that advice. But how about ask an expert? If we're looking for a website in general for help, we have an ask an expert session at NDSU that can answer any of your gardening questions. You just type in the question and our question wrangler Bob will send us send it to the appropriate person to answer the question. And we have one last question here in Fargo. There's a hundred year old burrows have lots of brown scales. Do you need to worry about it? I would need to know where the scale is appearing at. Is it on the one year old growth? Or is it on the trunk or the branches? What are we calling scale? You probably have some sort of lecaneum scale going on there. There are some wasps that can cause some gulls on orcs as well. That can be a misconstructive scale. But if there's scale in sex, you probably want to assess how much damage is taking place and treat them by either spraying an insecticide or using a systemic insecticide. I would look and determine how bad the scale insects are actually causing, how much problem they're actually causing before we actually treat them for anything. There's one other note being flashed in Fargo here, one more thing. The comment was dormant oil and that may help as well depending on what type of scale it is. That's a good question. If you have a friend of the bucket truck that will help. Otherwise, in a lot of situations you almost have to hire a commercial enterprise to do that for you. If you're spraying fungicides on spruce trees to cure needle cast or get it under control, a lot of times you can do that right with your feet firmly planted on the ground because that fungus doesn't get very high up into the air before the air movement starts to really gel properly and you don't have situations. So it depends on how high up it is. I certainly am not a proponent of putting your life at risk over a few insects. First of all, let's make sure we diagnose the right situation. Again, that's where a digital camera comes in really handy. You can send an email to Steve with photos of what you're actually seeing. So Steve can diagnose and determine who the enemy is and from there we can give you the proper recommendation. But in general, from my experience as a horticulture educator, you've got a 100 year old tree that's done pretty good without much pesticide treatment and it probably will live several more years. In most many cases, trees do a good job healing themselves. So let's just identify the enemy before we start spending money and all these resources on a problem that doesn't need to be treated. Okay, with that, let's all thank Steve and the plant doctors.