What is affecting my Bearss lime tree.

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FondOfFronds Oceanside, CA(Zone 10b) May 27, 2007

I've had this medium dwarf Bearss tree that up until this summer was a prolific lime producer. All we did was water it, give it fertilizer and it has given us a lot of fruit over the years. Almost too many to use!

Now, we have been unusually busy this year with family issues and I haven't been paying attention to the trees like I usually do. And today I noticed that this Bearss lime looks like it has some kind of disease, don't know what.

I'll post some pics of this tree, we just pruned quite a few limbs that looked like they were shot. This has been such a favorite tree, but is it dying? What should I do? I do have some worm castings I could give it right now, which I've been told is very helpful to get rid of the whiteflies (we use it for that purpose on our hibiscus hedge), which I do see have generally invaded quite a bit of this tree's leaves. Help! >=-(

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FondOfFronds Oceanside, CA(Zone 10b) May 27, 2007

Here are the leaves in general after we pruned them some.

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FondOfFronds Oceanside, CA(Zone 10b) May 27, 2007

A bunch of the affected leaves. What's that brown stuff?
We did go for a while that the tree received less water than usual. As I said, we were very busy...

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FondOfFronds Oceanside, CA(Zone 10b) May 27, 2007

Here's a branch. There are a lot of dead sticks poking out on it, like they were former branches or something.

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FondOfFronds Oceanside, CA(Zone 10b) May 27, 2007

Here's the whole tree.

So did not watering it right for about two or three months, does that seem like it could have contributed to it's condition?

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FondOfFronds Oceanside, CA(Zone 10b) May 27, 2007

The last pic.

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ecrane3 Dublin, CA(Zone 9a) May 28, 2007

The worm castings are a good idea, but I would try a nice strong jet from the hose first to blast off as much as you can, that usually works pretty well for me. My guess is that the plant was stressed from the lack of water, and that made it more susceptible to insects, etc. I'm not sure if the brown is from insect damage or if it's a result of the lack of water, but I think it's probably one of those so if you can get rid of the insect infestation and resume normal watering so that you don't further stress the plant I think it'll recover.

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FondOfFronds Oceanside, CA(Zone 10b) May 28, 2007

I just jetted the water off and now I'm gonna add in some worm castings. I was just wondering if I needed to spray the leaves with something... maybe that microfine oil, forgot what they call it... pretty benign stuff for the environment.

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