Need Help! Help me save my tree!

I've got some kind of pine tree in front of my townhouse and the side that faces the sun has turned brown in the past month. I know rain has been scarce recently, so I assumed the problem was lack of water. I've been giving it about 10 gal/day for 2 weeks now and the problem only seems to be getting worse. Everyone else's pine trees on my street look fine and I don't see people watering them.

Is there any way to rescue this tree? Will the part that is brown ever come back to life?

 

It's probably bagworms http://www.ehow.com/how_9370_control-bagworms.html

They seem to be the culprit in most evergreen tree deaths.

 

Thanks! I think that's the correct diagnosis. After a little research, I'm afraid I'm late to the battle and will have to resort to chemical warfare. At least this Bt stuff is pretty safe.

 

If it is bagworms they are easy to identify, peak inside the branches and they are hanging in there wrapped in bits of the tree.

We had one on the side of the garage last year with this issue. Picked them all off and problem solved. Probably 50-75 of the buggers at the point we noticed, this year the tree has come back nicely.

Mike

 

This is a bagworm somehow that ended up on the front lamp, need to get rid of that guy although he has been there a while...

 

It's definitely bagworms, but there's way too many to pick off, it would take days. I've read plenty of good stuff about BT being the thing to use to kill them, however it appears that no stores sell it, only websites. How convenient...

I'm not all that confident the tree will live anyway, about 1/3 of it is brown.

 

You would be surprised how resilient plant life is. I once took a dwarf yellow rose bush out of the ground with intent of transplanting it to the other side of the house. I got side tracked and left it out all night just sitting on the sidewalk. The next morning the thing was dead looking, brown, hard. I planted it anyway, gave it some plant food for a couple of weeks. No leaves just brown stems. Weeks later it sprouted a leaf, and a couple weeks after that it was blooming again.

Treat the tree if you want to keep it, it will come back.

 

We're trying to save it. The wife started working on removing the bagworms while I'm at work today and she just called to say she stopped counting after a finding a few hundred and not really feeling like she was making a dent in the numbers.

Got the BT stuff ordered off the internet, really hope it works.

 

Sasquatch591,

I have some left over chemical from last year. I used it to treat the pine tree in front of our house late last year. If you need it I can give it to you for free..

Cheers

 

I believe you can use a product called Sevin. It is made by Ortho and you can purchase it at Home Depot. We had bagworms on a pine and I believe this did the trick. Just used it to get rid of scale on our Magnolia. It takes care of many different kinds of pests and it is about $14 a bottle. Hope this helps.

 

I did get some Sevin stuff, but still waiting for the BT to come in the mail. Sevin is pretty nasty and possibly carcinogenic (but then again, what isn't? :rolleyes3

This whole "picking them off the tree" thing is a little unrealistic. The wife filled an entire plastic grocery bag with them and barely put a dent in the population on the tree which is about 10 feet tall and 5 feet in diameter.

She reports today though that the Sevin appears to have helped (I sprayed monday afternoon). She says the worms are dying, so that's good. But I'll keep nuking the tree straight through next spring just to be double sure. That mushroom cloud over the neighborhood might be from my yard.

She also reported today it looks like the worms are spreading to the pine trees in other yards on the street (Windy Oaks Sq) so we'll warn the neighbors.

 

Sevin is pretty nasty but it works on bagworms. We're pretty careful about pesticide use and only spot treat when needed (and try to use more environmentally safe products when possible) but bagworms are something we don't mess around with. They'll destroy a tree in a very short amount of time and spread all over the place.

 

I thought there were 50-75... mentioned this to Kim and she said there were over 600 she removed...stopped counting beyond a point...eventually gave up and sprayed the tree. Guess you can tell who dealt with the bagworms. She said that one can have up to 1000 eggs.

Mike