Grand Junction – Samples have been coming in to the Extension office daily of dead and dying evergreens. While Austrian pines seem to be suffering the most, they are not alone; Scots, ponderosa, and mugo are coming in with brown or tan needles, often with bands of darker brown and only a little green. Even the occasional Colorado pink spruce sample is showing up. Only the pinions seem to be largely immune.
With one exception, there is no indication of any
disease or insect problems on these samples.
They are suffering, quite badly, from severe winter desiccation, the
result of two years in a row of severe winter drought.
These two winters could hardly have been more
different. A year ago, Grand Junction
was experiencing record high temperatures in the upper 70’s. Inevitably, this early season of
growth-promoting, dormancy-breaking warmth was followed by a late hard
frost. Many of these evergreens, hit at
a tender stage, lost all their terminal buds.
Their needles began showing the brown banding of drought stress.
This winter you may have noticed that we were
unusually cold. A snowfall on December
19 brought the temperatures crashing down and a temperature inversion set in
for a couple of months. You may have
seen the reports of air quality in Salt Lake City? Well, Grand Junction wasn’t far behind. While the humans headed for the hills seeking
warmer temperatures and cleaner air, the trees were not so fortunate.
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| Ponderosa pine with drought stress. Note the healthy tree to the right - its roots are on the north side of the berm and the stressed tree's roots are on the south side. |
People often want to believe that snow cover equals moisture, but not when the temperatures are so cold. In a process called sublimation, water changes from a solid to a gas without ever becoming liquid. It actually draws moisture out of the soil, not that we had any to speak of to begin with! So, another very dry winter, but this time it was too cold to water. All we could do was wait until the winds came and the air temperature warmed up on its own, though some residents had creative ideas regarding the use of the orchards’ wind machines to blow that nasty inversion out of the valley.
The one exception I mentioned earlier is an insect
problem that seems to be fairly unique to our area, at least in terms of
severity. Austrian pines in particular
are often attacked by black pineleaf scale here, and perhaps because people
don’t notice it until needles start to brown these infestations often do become
quite severe. I have never seen this
insect infest a healthy, vigorous tree, but I am seeing it on a lot of trees
right now.
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| Black pineleaf scale on Austrian pine |
David discussed last week how critical it is to
ensure that our woody plants get a good soak in the fall, to go into winter
with moist soil around their roots.
During extended periods of very dry weather over the winter, supplemental
moisture every month or so helps prevent root death from dehydration. This needs to be done on a day when the air
temperature is above 32 degrees F. While
we could have attended to this during the winter of 2012, it wasn’t possible
for us under the severe cold conditions of the 2013 inversion. And our evergreens, which continue to
transpire even in the winter, suffered.
The drought that didn’t kill them off a year ago probably succeeded in
many cases this time around. All I can
advise people right now is to water, and wait and see.
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