I Think We Killed It

This is what our sycamore looks like these days.

It developed a fungus on some of the leaves that I tried to treat with neem oil. When that didn't help, and most of the leaves had fallen off, I did some research. We may have overwatered it, we may have planted the rootball too low.

Or maybe, this is just part of the normal cycle -- it is a deciduous tree after all. To be continued in the spring.

Milk! It Does a Rose Bush Good!

We have powdery mildew. It's the worst on the Phoenix rose Rob transplanted in front of the fence.

I found this milk cure online. It worked great, but I didn't do a second application soon enough, so the mildew's back in full force on Phoenix.

The other roses are pretty much cured from the first treatment, but I'm going to use milk as a preventative...

It's In!

We planted the Engelmann oak this weekend after consulting our contractor about where our sewer line is. These trees put down insane tap roots, so we didn't want any plumbing problems. Right now, we've got weeds that are bigger than this little guy, but he will grow to be gigantic.








This is a picture of an Engelmann on the Cal Tech campus. It's estimated to be 400 years old. Hope ours gets to live that long.

We went to Cal Tech because, according to the Arroyo Seco Foundation, our sapling will die off if it doesn't have the right symbiotic mycorrhizal funghi for its roots. The easiest way to make sure it does is to put a little dirt from under an established oak in the planting hole. We had visited the Cal Tech Engelmann when we were deciding what kind of oak to plant and thought it would be nice to start our tree off with a little of its dirt. Unfortunately, it's fenced off so you can't get to it, so we had to settle for some dirt from a random oak by where we parked the car. That's me scraping some dirt (and a couple of acorns) into a plastic bag from Taco Bell. Hope I got the right fungus!