A Stroll Through the Garden: An old oak tale
One Saturday evening about 15 years ago, I was close to having a church controversy in my yard. My friends and I were busy getting a fire started in my fire pit, and we were beginning to teach how to start fires. We were all involved in a bit of a Boy Scout group.
As the time passed, we got a good fire going in our fire ring and the temperatures were getting a little cool. My wife had put on a jacket, and we were doing up some s’mores and some pie iron pies with some apple filling, pizza filling and many more. We even had some odd creations. As the evening progressed and all the ornery people had a chance to tell a story or two, my friends were walking about the yard and some of them played a little volleyball under the light of the lamps with the young people. All of us were having a good time.
Then something odd happened. An acorn fell from the tree and landed on my bald friend’s head and made the most interesting sound. My friend said "ouch!"
Please note that we don’t have a small oak in the yard with great distance from the ground. This same friend looked at me and I just shrugged my shoulders. Then I looked at my other friend and he had a blank look on his face, which didn’t give me any clue as to whether he did it or not. The evening continued as before and nothing happened for a few hours. Then I heard another thunk and an "ouch"! With a serious look at all the jokesters, my friend looked at all of us and wondered if it was one of us?
Acorns are not the only things that fall from oaks in late summer. I was mowing in my front yard and driving along as innocently as possible a few weeks ago and next thing I knew that the heavy part of a small branch hit me on the top of my head. My small yard is littered with about over a dozen branches that just seemed to amazingly drop from the sky without rhyme or reason.
A reader of our column asked me some time ago what would cause these branches to litter the ground under his oak. One of the trials with this problem is that you may not find the insect itself as you would find some of the leftovers. There are two possible insects that would cause this sort of an issue. Both are beetles, and one is called the twig girdler, Oncideres cingulata; and the twig pruner, or Elaphidionoides villosa.
The twig girdler, as it sounds, cuts around the twig and then it drops in time. In contrast, the twig pruner hollows out the heartwood of the twig and then fall with a small hole in the end. As the twig pruner hollows out the twig and the larvae leave the twig in April and May, the twigs dry out and falls in late summer.
Adult twig pruners leave their eggs behind on these twigs. The pupae in the twig girdler stay inside a burrow in the twig as it falls also in late summer and plugs the holes that it makes. Both the twig pruner and twig girdler stay on the twig as they fall. Therefore, an easy control is to gather the cut branches and get rid of them. If you were to put a compound called tanglefoot around the base of the tree, there is a solid chance that you could catch the insect before it starts the climb for a second branch.
I hope you have a nice stroll through your gardens this week. If you see an issue in your yard, you can email me at ericlarson546@yahoo.com. You can find links to my blog posts where you can leave comments on my website ohiohealthyfoodcooperative.org. Thank you for your participation in the column.
Eric Larson of Jeromesville is a veteran landscaper and gardening enthusiast and a founding board member of the Ohio Chapter of Association of Professional Landscape Designers.
This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Oak trees dropping branches in summer: Beetles could be to blame
