De-stresssing Blue Spruce

Everyone knows that if we eat healthy food, exercise regularly, get plenty of sleep, have a healthy gut biome, and a generally low stress life, you are infinitely less susceptible to getting sick.  Trees and other landscaping are no different.  They need to be watered properly, planted in good soils, and have deep strong roots in a healthy soil microbial community.

In urban areas, trees and landscaping are often fighting adverse, stressful conditions.  They may have been planted up against cement or a building, planted in construction hard pan, not native to this climate, or have historically been hit with chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Life is not as easy for them as it would be in a natural system.  They are infinitely more likely to get pest or disease pressure because of all these stressors.

Conventional wisdom, which is based on a chemical company’s business model and not what is good for your pocket book or your living landscapes, would be to chemically fertilize them and then spray with fungicides or insecticides when they inevitably have a health issue.  We strongly recommend a more proactive approach, stimulating a healthy soil microbial community, watering deeply and infrequently, and selecting plants that can survive in tough environments.

Consider an example with Blue Spruce.  This homeowner planted a row of them along his gravel driveway 20 years ago.  Before we started working with him, he would spray Roundup on the weeds that popped up in the gravel and underneath the branches.  He is a very diligent and particular homeowner and was extremely careful to only spot spray the specific weeds and never let it drift onto the trees themselves.  According to the chemical companies, there are no residual effects in the soil that could have hurt his trees.  While it is technically true that glyphosate in Roundup doesn’t directly kill plants that it doesn’t contact, years and years of chemical sprays killed the soil biology around his trees, and that nearly resulted in the death of his Blue Spruces.  Glyphosate is the most widely used antibiotic in the world, currently exceeding the use of all other antibiotics combined.  It killed the beneficial soil biology and this, in turn, stressed out the homeowners' trees, even though he was watering and managing them correctly in every other way.

This stress opened up the trees to disease, such as Rhizosphaera Needle Cast.  It is a fungal disease that attacks weak, stressed Blue Spruce.  The conventional recommendations he received was to spray these trees with a fungicide that contains chlorothalonil.  While technically this would get rid of the disease fungi for a very short period of time, it would not be solving the problem of the trees being stressed from having poor soil biology conditions.  It would also wipe out all forms of beneficial fungi, creating an easy environment for the disease fungi to come right back.  This is all beside the fact that chlorothalonil is a carcinogen that should be handled with extreme caution.

Instead, this homeowner did the smart thing: he called Organic Lawn and we foliarly treated the trees and surrounding soil with a compost extract full of beneficial bacteria and fungi, plus foods to help them establish three times over the summer.  Disease fungi are generally weak bullies and if you can get healthy competition back in the game, they go away.  Treating the soil also undid the damage to his soil biome from years of spraying pesticides near the base of the trees.

Moral of the story is this: we need to solve problems, not treat symptoms.  Also, don’t habitually spray pesticides.  They can be used as a one time tool if they are desperately needed, but chronic use causes chronic problems and that leads to using even more poisons.  Breaking out of this cycle by creating resilience through soil health and diverse soil biology is a better approach.