Tanglefoot stuff

I am always looking for stuff to help me with my trees __that is not designed to be toxic__ ie. is not a biocide, does not end with the four letters C I D E. Of course they have now renamed algaecide to algaefix :-( . By the way renaming it didn’t change it from being nasty, toxic, and a carcinogen. But renaming it sure works with people who don’t read … the back of the container. :-)

I have used Tanglefoot in the past to prevent ants from climbing up the steel beams into my house which helps me to not use ant poison inside the house. It is a very sticky substance that stays sticky for fairly long periods of time and is used to prevent ants from herding aphids. You smear it around the tree trunk and the ants can’t walk over the stickiness. The aphids are left without protection and the lady bugs get them. Or even the bushtits :-) my kind of aphid control.

Well I was looking at some of my trees and there was some borer damage to a few. Borers are a variety of insects, some are beetles, some are small nats. But they are like leaf miners to the stems, branches, and trunks of trees. The eggs are laid, larvae hatch out, and start feeding on the soft nutrient filled tissues right under the bark. If they chew all the way around they “girdle” the stem and kill everything above the damage. So a fairly minor infestation can in rare instances actually kill a lot of the woody material of a tree.

My neighbors insist that you have to spray insecticide all over the trees to control borers. Now if a tree is healthy it has learned to defend itself by forcing sticky sap into the tunnels that the borers make. If the tree is healthy you sometimes see little sticky worm like extrusions from the bark. The trees pretty much know what they are doing :-) and are reasonably good at it given that they’ve been doing it just a little bit longer than humans have been in existence.

The problem comes about with dwarfing root stocks and other things that cripple trees. Think about it my friends, the only reason a tree is dwarfed is that it is not doing as well as the full sized one. Think about how you make a Bonsai!

There are a lot of claims that it does not affect fruit production but I can guarantee you the tree is not doing as well as normal. So the agrocompanies graft onto a rootstock that cripples a tree and then are pleasantly surprised that it gets sick more often (well the pests have just become more robust right?) and the homeowner has to use more pesticides to keep it healthy. Well, as healthy as possible with a dwarfing rootstock.

One of my purposes in airlayering is to take all my trees back to their own roots. Hey I’ll be able to compare the trees side by side.

Back to the borers. If I could just help a little and prevent some of the borers from coming out it would prevent them from mating, and laying eggs, and help the long term health of my trees. So I have spread a little Tanglefoot around and over some obvious borer damage. We will see. Life is an experiment.