I went on vacation last week, and while away, some very kind
friends took care of my house and garden, keeping everything
watered and healthy in our absence.
I went on vacation last week, and while away, some very kind friends took care of my house and garden, keeping everything watered and healthy in our absence.
If only I had known that it wasn’t the plants I set out that needed the most care – it was the tangerine tree that was in the back yard when we moved in.
Sunday, I was doing some chores when I heard a loud crash. I headed outside to investigate and found that the tree, which was 12 to 15 feet tall, had just toppled over.
Stunned, I examined the destruction. The tree’s roots didn’t come out of the ground; it broke about a foot up. Peering into the trunk, I saw that the outside wood looked fine, but the core of the tree was pretty icky – dark and spongy. And it was swarming with ants.
All this baffled me. Was the tree rotten? Could ants have done enough damage to make it fall over? The leaves looked healthy and the first fruits were starting to ripen. So what the heck happened?
I did what any bewildered novice gardener would do – I went inside. Then I called the University of California Cooperative Extension’s Master Gardeners hotline. This service is the gardener’s dream. A bunch of people who like to garden learn all they can about plants, pests, soil and other gardening topics, then they voluntarily man the phone lines to answer questions any gardener might have, from what the best ornamental grasses are for this area to why one’s tangerine tree just fell over with no warning one day.
So, after some research and without having seen my tree, here’s what the master gardener I talked to told me:
1. Citrus trees require even watering and basically need to be kept moist. I watered the tree, but I must admit, it wasn’t very even.
2. Citrus trees have quite a capacity for recovery, which means they can survive – and often benefit from – a lot of pruning. I never pruned the tree, but, in my defense, its crown seemed proportionate to its trunk. And while they can generally recover, a tree where more than three-quarters of the trunk has come apart (like mine) probably won’t survive attempts to right it and have it grow together again.
3. Ants won’t hurt trees, but they often work in conjunction with aphids, which will. See, the aphids, the nasty little sapsuckers, leave behind a sticky residue called honeydew that ants really like, so the ants keep the aphids on the plant, producing more honeydew. So while I didn’t notice any aphids on the tree, all those ants mean there probably were some. Or a lot.
4. Cut off suckers. Suckers are the branches that don’t seem to be growing from the tree trunk but from the ground right by it. They take the tree’s energy, and they mean that the tree is stressed out. I had previously cut back suckers on the tree, but some new ones had sprouted up.
5. The dark, spongy center means there probably was a fungus of some sort that attacked the tree, stressing it out even more.
I’m expecting more information in the mail from the master gardeners on growing citrus. The gardener I talked to told me I could bring in a branch for them to look at, which would give them a better idea of what happened to the poor thing. And if they can’t help me, then they can send a sample to a state agency for further examination. I just might do that because, as the gardener I talked to told me, if the tree was attacked by a fungus, it could be a soil-borne one that would attack another tree planted there.
I feel particularly bad when about the tree’s death, but with my new information, I plan to take extra care of the citrus trees I have left.
To reach master gardeners in Santa Clara County, call (408) 282-3105 Monday-Friday from 9:30am to 12:30pm. In San Benito County, call (831) 763-8007 Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 9am to noon.
