Picea Browning Needles & White Fuzz

Treebeard

For the last few weeks as I have been watering and tending my trees I have been looking at my Picea glauca group, blinking and looking again. It looked like the needles were slowly turning brown, but as I am one of the 8% of British males that suffers from red/green colour blindness I wasn't 100% sure, because sometimes in high contrast (sun/shade) light conditions lots of things take on a reddish tinge to my eye. I just put the needle colour down to that.

Well, today I took a real close look, and the needles are brown, whats more they fall off when brushed. Needless to say I am quite concerned that this problem went for so long before I actually realised there was a problem.

And, to make matters worse, when I got up close and took a long look all round the planting, I found what looks like a pretty bad spider mite infestation. Luckily I've never actually had first hand experience of mites, so can someone confirm or deny this please.

Regards,

Chris.

Attached Images

dsc-w1 107.jpg (62.6 KB, 73 views)

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TreeBay

Looks like what you've got. There are a couple tests you can use, tapping the branch over a sheet of paper and then rubbing any specks with a fingertip to see if they smear red. Misting the branches with a fine sprayer to look for webs, but if you look for the Spruce Spider Mite on this page, the description seems to match your damage!

http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2012.html

There's a photo here that looks scarily similar:

http://www.uidaho.edu/so-id/entomol...te%20damage.jpg

I started a new page on Spider mites, linking together some of what I found

Regards,

Matt

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Moni

I agree and because it is a blue spruce, you are limited on what to use. Any of the oils will take away the blue cast. So that includes Neem. You might try just giving the tree frequent hard sprays of water. I do that with my arborvitae hedge. It works because mites like a hot and DRY environment. The hard spray not only will knock out some of the mites but it will also put them in a moist environment that can then encourage disease among the mites to kill off the rest. Otherwise, there are some miticides you can use but they can be hard to find. I know Insecticidal Soap is listed for mites but I have not had good luck with that because mites are such stubborn little critters. Neem works pretty well on mites, unfortunately. Any other tree and I would tell you to use that. Just make sure that whatever you use is labeled as a miticide or you are just wasting your money.
Moni