The Ponderosa Pine is a very large evergreen with distinctive orange-red bark with black cracks or crevices running through it. The trees tend to have bright green needles rather than the blue-green hue found on many types of pines. If you have a large yard or property and want a new evergreen for the sights and scents, the Ponderosa pine could prove a worthy addition.
Keep your Ponderosa pine looking beautiful with some routine care, which includes monitoring for signs of damage. If you suspect the damage is coming from a tree disease, call in a tree care professional like Gene's Tree Service to diagnose and treat the problem. Here are two tree diseases that can affect the Ponderosa Pine.
Elytroderma Needle Cast
The fungus-borne elytroderma disease causes the Ponderosa's needles to show signs of ill health from the summer to fall before dying off in the spring. The vibrant green needles will first fade and look sickly before turning brown and falling from the tree. Witches brooms, which are knobbed clusters of twig-like structures, will form on the branches in the areas of affected needles. Puffed up cysts can also form on the branches and the cysts can "bleed" a sappy or resin-like material.
There is no real cure for the needle cast disease but generally healthy Ponderosa pine trees can often fight off the disease with relatively little and mostly cosmetic damage. Call in a tree trimming service to prune away the unattractive affected needles and clear the ground of fallen needles.
If the symptoms have spread through much of the tree, the Ponderosa might not fight off the disease and the needle cast could prove fatal. Call a tree care service for evaluation to determine if a tree removal service is needed.
Atropellis Canker
Atropellis canker causes distortions in the bark that resemble open sores or cankers. The edges of the canker will seem jagged and raw with a potentially reddened color while the wood at the center of the canker will darken to a blue-black color. A tree can get an individual canker or get scatterings of cankers across multiple branches.
This fungal tree disease is mostly a cosmetic issue and tends not to do any long-term damage to a Ponderosa pine. If the tree develops a number of open cankers on a particular branch or branches, you can call in a tree trimming service to prune off the affected branches. You might need to trim off a significant number of branches to keep the canker from spreading, but a tree in otherwise good health should fight off this disease fairly well.
Share19 July 2016
I love and appreciate all of the trees around my home, but I do worry about what will happen during a strong storm. Will I get rudely awakened by by a tree crashing through the roof into my bedroom? Will a tree fall and take down the power lines that my family relies on each day to live our comfortable life? This blog will show you what you need to know before you go cutting down all of the trees on your property to maintain a safe living space and advice for picking and choosing the trees that will remain.