Black needles on Sequoia sempervirens...please help!

JR_Roosa

This one might be worth a giggle, at least, but if you have some ideas I'd be really appreciative.

I have a coast redwood that I just up-potted two weeks ago into a big shallow terra-cotta pot from a small shallow terra-cotta pot. It was getting root-bound and in suboptimal soil. Repotting went well...I didn't cut the root ball back much since I'm wanting to let the tree grow out to get a thicker trunk.

It's not the optimal climate here for coast redwood, but I'm sentimentally attached, since it's my oldest, so I've been nursing it along for a few years. This year it's been growing the best yet. I suppose that it's decided that moping won't get us to move back to California.

Anyway, now it's in some faster draining soil I've mixed (3-5mm sifted 30% kanuma, 30% pea gravel, and 40% bark, the old stuff was like cactus mix and it sucked). It seems to be getting plenty of water since the tips of new growth aren't drooping like they used to when the old pot got dry.

Another new change is that I've put in automated watering with a sprayer on the foliage...maybe you read that post. There doesn't seem to be any root rot, but I thought I'd make sure you have all the information.

However, I just noticed that some of the lowest branches on one side of the pot are truning black, which I've never seen before. I have seen the needles get spotty dry bits here and there on the tree, which I've attributed to the dry air, but never black.

While I was cutting off the black branchlets, I noticed the distinct smell of dog urine, and some sticky splatters on the pot. The black branches are on the exposed side of the pot, facing the yard. Now that its in a bigger pot, I placed it on the ground rather than on a stand, and it's well within range. I've put all that together, and I'm guessing that the urine caused the black needles.

Here are my questions:

Urine causing blackened needles? Does that sound right or should I be looking for another culprit? Anybody ever overwater or rot the roots on a coast redwood? What's that look like? I thought yellow needles rather than black.

I've moved the tree up off the ground and ran about 4 gallons of water through the pot by hand in case there's been salt build-up, and to de-nastify it. Anything else I should do?

What about dry spots on the other needles, while I have your attention. Any idea what might be causing those? It doesn't seem to have a preference for needle tips, and it seems to be worse on old growth than on new growth. Also, I get the impression that it comes and goes, rather than just killing the needles. What do you think?

I've also had some unexplained black leaves on some aspen cuttings...dog pee too? They're coming up off the ground now anyway. Weekend project: build some more stands.

Anyway thanks for your help. I'll post this while I get some pictures to post in a few minutes.

-J.

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JR_Roosa

Here are the tree and the probable guilty party.

Next are the black needles.

Last are some browning needles, which have been showing up for the past several years with different watering (too much, too little, just right), and different light (inside next to a big window in the winter, full sun or part shade in the spring summer and fall).

Thanks again.

-J.

Postscript...if you would like a clearer picture, I can get out the real camera. I thought the cameraphone shots would be good enough for now.

Attached Images

	Tuck_sequoia.jpg (63.1 KB, 87 views)
	Black_needles.jpg (40.7 KB, 73 views)
	Brown_spots.jpg (50.3 KB, 62 views)

TreeBay

I can't make out too much in your cellphone photos. Looks like the doggie wants to play, though. Maybe with higher resolution pictures we'd see more? - photograph in open shade or in early morning/dusk. Maybe play with that dog in the meantime!

Regards,

Matt

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JR_Roosa

OK. I'll get some better pix. Sorry for being lazy. The dynamic range on that phone isn't the best.

The dog wouldn't stay out of the picture when I was putting together a bunch of pix for a thread on drip systems the other day. The best I could do was to put him on a stay in frame.

He always wants to play. He has a funny trick of dropping tennis balls or other toys into whatever I'm working on in the yard to get me to play fetch. It's awesome when he drops a heavy toy onto something delicate, breaking it in half.

He's too cute to shoot, though.

I'm off to get you some better pictures. Stay tuned.

-J.

JR_Roosa

The pictures won't go in order...that's annoying...

OK, black needles are obvious so I haven't marked them.

Another picture are some of the brown/yellow needles. Note that some are brown on the sides, others on the tips. This is just inside the range of focus on my wife's digital camera (I'd prefer film, but that's not practical today...maybe I need a nice Nikon digital SLR to diagnose this problem with my tree...hmmmm).

Finally some more browning needles. These are a little fuzzy too, and you can see the razor-sharp focus on the bottom right. Sorry.

The general spottyness on the leaves is from some hard water marks, but some of them are little brown spots that I'm not going to try to photograph today. Could the little spots be the beginnings of the big spots? I wonder.

It's just odd that these come and go, rather than just killing the needle. At least the brown spots anyway...the black stuff looks awfully nasty and I've cut that all out of the tree already.

Well, happy pondering. I hope somebody has some suggestions.

Thanks!

-J.

Attached Images

	Brown Needles.jpg (63.6 KB, 44 views)
	Black_Needles.jpg (64.2 KB, 45 views)
	More_Brown_Needles.jpg (69.2 KB, 25 views)

onlyrey

JR_Roosa,

Nice looking coastal redwood! Love the picture with the suspect next to the crime also.

About the browning on the tips of some leaves:
Please look at this thread that has to do with my Dawn Redwood and some advice from other members:
http://forum.bonsaitalk.com/showthread.php?t=17635
My conclusion from what I have heard from others and seen for my self is that since the tree has a lot of folliage and not much roots to support it (inside a pot), the fluid reserves are low, and when temperatures go higher and humidity lower, the tree will suck more water and if it doesn't find enough then he browning will happen. I have to keep this tree very well watered and on a rigid schedule to minimize browning of the leaves; your dripping system is most likely a reasonable solution. Just make sure that you get the water into the pot, and not just misted on the leaves. I am letting my redwood have a lot of folliage because I want the trunk to develop faster.

About the black leaves:
This is just a guess: Maybe the leaves are to touching the soil and carrying up something undesirable like bacteria or fungus. I would just trim anything that touches the soil to make sure nothing climbs up by the leafs. If only black leaves are on the lower branches then this might be the case. Simply cut anything that comes into contact with the soil and/or use some kind of support so that nothing touches the bottom.

Regards

JR_Roosa

Thanks Olnyrey, but it looks nicer than it is. It has about 5 trunks, the biggest only 1/2 inch, hence the repot.

The foliage is growing like crazy this year. It started budding out INDOORS! That blew my mind since I thought it was barely surviving in the dry house all winter. I cut out about half of the branches a few months ago because they were coming out in whorls on the trunk and making burls. It still has a bit more pruning of bar branches to go, but I wanted to let it get its roots established in the new pot.

Anyway, I looked at your post, and that's what I would expect to see from a dry pot--an even dying back on most needles. The spottyness on mine scares me because it seems fungal or vascular, almost like the burns you get on japanese maple from hard water, but I didn't think that's a problem for sequoia. The kanuma its in now should be protective from that, but the "pea gravel" might have some limestone in it, which would overpower any acidity in the bark and kanuma.

I've cut back some of the low branches today that were on the soil, but some of the black needles were well above the soil.

The tree gets water from the sprayer you can see in the 1st pic with the hound, and from soaker hose in the pot that's in the background on some other pics. The soil is damp from watering to watering, since I've been keeping a close eye on the new system. I'm tempted to cut back on its water a bit now that it's getting more than a week or two from repotting, but I'm going to hold off until I hear back from more folks. I might even put a valve on the sprayer and turn it down a bit, but again I'm going to hold off until I hear more.

Thanks again for your advice, onlyrey. I appreciate it.

-Jason.

bwaynef

Put him in a box and ship him to me if it gets real bad.

WF

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Bonsai Barry

Good job. Very few of us own a dog that will water our trees. My suggestion is to get a cat to take care of the fertilizling.

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