Trees, Shrubs and Conifers: Mugo Pine turning brown: Help!, 1 by stormyla

stormyla wrote:
Cheryl, I believe that you and Snapple are on the right track with the voles. You really should dig the dead conifer up and look at the roots and earth.

This week, I dug up 6 dead Deciduous Azaleas and 2 dead Rhodos. Same problem with all of them. No roots!!!! The shrub pictured was a gorgeous 5' tall orange Deciduous Azalea. They, and my Varigated red twig Dogwood all died the same slow death. Last year they went into a slow decline losing leaves and having branches die off. This year only a few branches on each started leafing out, then abrupt death set in.

I planted a Rhodo in the spot that the Dogwood was in, only to lose it the same way. Now, I am planting all shrubs and Hosta inside of homemade hardware cloth pots in the ground. These buggers reproduce faster than I can kill them .

Every year, even though I plant more each year, my Tulip and Daffodils keep dwindling. I'm just feeding those suckers!!! I have 2 very large Maples losing their Bark and completely girdled from the bottom. They are full of dying limbs. I've been putting down poisons all summer & have killed many of them. I've just switched to ZP which is Zinc Phosphide pellets as they had learned to avoid the Ramik poison. You can't use these if you have pets. I've ripped out ground covers where they may hide and really try to get all debris out of the beds ASAP. Next year I'm going to apply a much thinner layer of mulch.

My beds are full of holes and tunnels. My grass has lots of tunnels too. I read on one of the university sites that every so many years there is an unexplained explosion in their population and that it is eventually self correcting. I found the MoleMax to be useless. They do coexist with other critters. Mine use the Groundhog's den and tunnels as points of entry and refuge. Since I switched poisons they have gone crazy digging new tunnels in other areas in my beds. However, I am finding dead ones. Score 1 for the gardeners!!!

In my shrub beds in front of the house, almost every shrub has damage and I've lost 4 Azaleas and 2 Laurels and now maybe a Daphne there too. In that bed, there are zig zag tunnels thru the mulch from shrub to shrub. I just ripped all of the Hellebores out of there so they couldn't hide under it. They have recently started attacking my Purple Smoke Bushes.

Everything that I have read stresses how important it is to reduce their population in the fall as it is during the winter when plants are dormant and food supply is diminished that they do the most damage to trees, shrubs and bulbs. They are not like Moles. They do not hibernate.