Mugo Pine turning brown: Help!

Anyone have any idea what's causing this? Red spider mites? Fungus? Too dry? Too wet? Dog-vomit slime mold??!
Our weather here in Pittsburgh was hot, wet, & humid for first part of summer, now cooler & dry.
For the record, I also have in this landscape bed an azalea which looks dead, probably from very poorly dranined soil, which hopefully I've amended. The mugo pine is just 4 or 5 feet away, but further from the house than the azalea.

This was planted about 2 1/2 years ago, and had been doing beautifully. I don't want to lose it! :-(

Another picture:
Is the white stuff sap, or fungus?

I don't see any markings on the brown needles, like needle cast or anything like that.

This message was edited Aug 14, 2008 8:11 AM

Update:
I've spent the morning researching, and I think my problem is *gulp* VOLES!
Now, I'm 52 years old and have been gardening for a l -o- n- g time, and I never knew we had voles in this part of the country?! But the shallow tunnels all through the mulch, with more 'activity' right around the bases of my little shrubs, seem to indicate pine voles. If they even dare go near my young Japanese Maple, I'll be out there with a sledge hammer!
I'm about ready to rake all the mulch off all my beds, since they apparently love it.
I'm willing to bet now that they were responsible for the death of half our Mt. Laurel earlier this summer.
Paul James recommends castor oil granules, which I'll be looking for at the garden center TODAY!!

Resource: do a Yahoo image search for Pine Vole...you'll get many pics of the varmints as well as the tunnels they make in mulch beds.

Cheryl, so sorry you've discovered the major problems that voles can cause :( We've lost so many plants, trees and shrubs as a result of their tunneling! The first year we discovered the damage in the gardens was the year they successfully killed our huge Dragon Eye Pine. It was planted off our deck and we really enjoyed looking down on the variegated foliage. When we first noticed signs of distress it was already too late! They had tunneled under the tree and the damage to the roots was too extensive to save the tree and within a week it was dead :( We've tried most everything but are still fighting them in the gardens. The only solution we've found is to constantly check your plantings and stomp their tunnels so the plant's roots can once again make contact with the soil and prevent their roots from drying out. Unfortunately they usually return and it's a never ending battle around here. If you are actually lucky enough to see them in action (soil moving), use a pitchfork...works better than a sledgehammer! LOL

Here is what Penn State Cooperative Extension has to say about controlling voles.

http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/freepubs/pdfs/uh094.pdf

That's just a shame about losing such beautiful conifers. I hope the info offers some help.

Hmmmm.....
Not to be gross, but here's a photo of a varmit we caught in a mousetrap baited with apple.
IS it a vole?? Or a shrew?
After reading the above-linked article, I'm more confused than ever now. And thank you much, Snapple, for posting that link. I had tried to find such info yesterday, with no luck!
I did also buy Mole-Max pelletized castor oil repellent yesterday, and spread it (probably much too heavily) all around the areas where I've seen the tunnels in the mulch.

Here's another corpse photo of the unlucky bugger's face.
We also have a small tomato & bell pepper garden, which I keep mulched with grass clippings. Hubby lifted the clippings yesterday, and lo & behold, quite a series of runways in the soil underneath! But the veggie plants don't seem to have been bothered at all. (Except for the tomato hornworm I found last week...yechhhhh!)

That looks to me like a shrew. Did you put gloves on and check the teeth? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. Yuck! And are there visible ears. Shrews dont have visible ears.Take a look at this link. Much better pictures.

http://extension.umd.edu/publications/PDFs/fs654.pdf

Apparently shrews don't cause the landscape damage you are experiencing.

That's a shrew. I'd bet on it. So, if this isnt causing the damage to your landscape plants what is? The mystery deepens. Can you have both shrews and voles? I don't know. Give your Extension a call. They will help sort it out.

Even though moles and shrews don't eat plants, they still could do some collateral damage as they tunnel around, so if they were tunneling in the area they could have damaged your plant accidentally. Or you could have voles too, it's definitely possible to have more than one sort of pest like that, although I'm not sure if they'd hang out and be really active in the same exact area or not.

Well, in doing more research and photo searching, I'd have to say my dead critter is a northern short-tailed shrew. Eeww, it's bite is poisonous and paralyzes it's small victims?? No thanks, I'm not going to check his teeth!
But now I feel bad, because they eat spiders and centipedes and all sorts of other yuckky bugs. But then, why did it try to take the apple we baited the trap with??
This photo looks just like my photo:
http://www.volecontrol.com/pic_shrew.html
Snapple, how come you come up with the good university sites, and I come up with the commercial junk?

And yes, if it's not voles taking out some of my plants, then what?? Ooooohhhh, my head is spinning..... (*_*)
Thank you all for your input...I really appreciate it!

A Jack Russell would love to take care of your problem for you. LOL.

If there are a lot of shrews tunneling around underneath your plant, even though they don't eat the roots they can still cause a significant amount of damage. Or you might have voles as well and just didn't catch one yet.

I hope this isn't Diplodia. Mugo pines are said to be quite susceptible to it.

http://www.bonsai-bci.com/species/mugo-pine.html
http://web1.msue.msu.edu/imp/modzz/00001689.html

I'm not convinced though that this is the problem. That's such a good shot you posted that somebody here ought to able to identify it if it is a disease. I went all through Sinclair & Lyon's "Diseases of Trees and Shrubs" second edition and couldn't match it to anything. Come on all you experienced plantsman, help out here will ya!

Conifers can have so many problems...and there is so little that can be done once the symptoms start to show (browning/falling needles, etc.). I have (had) a picea abies 'Perry's Gold' that was new to my garden this year, as a two-year graft (and I'm pretty sure it was a one-year). I went outside to sprinkle the morning's coffee grounds around a hosta, and it was completely knocked out of the ground, needles almost entirely fallen off. I threw it into the compost heap. Sad thing was, it looked fine three days ago, the last time I saw it. Some animal must have run into it and knock it out, where it languished since I didn't see it and get it back in its hole. I'm seriously considering getting a trapping permit for squirrels, they've been going nuts lately, attacking my plant labels, digging huge holes, you name it. One of my neighbors feeds squirrels, though, so I can only imagine the conflict that me trapping them would cause...GRRRRRR!!!

The spring growth on the 'Perry's Gold' was spectacular, I think in 2009 I may take a trip to find an older specimen. It just wasn't meant to be this year, earlier in the season a squirrel took off the leader and now they finished the job.

Elizabeth

Well, I'm at a loss at this point. My poor mugo is just about done for, almost totally light brown now. I don't think it was the diplodica (thanks much AGAIN, Snapple!) because the candles earlier this summer did just fine, and turned into nice healthy new growth.
Are voles the only things that tunnel so closely to shrub bases? We wonder now if it was tunneling or voles that killed half of our Mt. Laurel earlier this summer.

It's depressing: so many of our plantings seem to be failing for one reason or another, things that have done well in the last few years since planting.

Speaking of 'nutty' squirrels, we've got a row of very tall old white pines, and the squirrels have made an absolute mess below three of them, munching on the young tasty pinecones.

Seems Mother Nature is telling us how P.O.'d she's getting about global warming??

If your mugho pine does die completely, carefully dig it up to see if there are any vole tunnels underneath the root system. I would bet it's voles!

Well, I'm doing the "apple under the flower pot with weight on top" vole test, and so far after 3 days, no nibbles on the apples. I put them in two different areas of the yard.

The mugo is totally brown. The guy at our local garden center is betting on spider mites. He said usually by the time you first notice damage, it's probably already too late. My concern now is that if indeed it was mites, they'll now move on to my dwarf alberta spruce just on the other side of the small front porch pad!

Nature can be so cruel to us garden lovers...... :-(

Cheryl, Go out to your pine trees and look on the ground at the cones. This photo is what a pine cone looks like after a vole has chewed at it. If you don't find any, it doesn't mean that you don't have voles, it just means that there probably isn't a colony near your pines.

Sorry Resin, I was tired.

Cheryl, You might want to read my thread in this forum called, Should I be worried?.

Been awhile since I could get back here.
Stormyla, I've got tons of chewed pine cones, but it's squirrels who are chewing them up in the trees before they ever hit the ground. They must have been extra tasty this year, because the squirrels were so busy munching high up in the pines that it was raining 'crumbs' under the pines for awhile. What a mess they made!

I do know now that the shrews are just having a field day around my shrubs, I guess because I've got so many earthworms.

I had a dead shrew on my driveway a couple of mornings ago. There is a pack of feral cats from behind a not so cared for home one block over that seems to have had a population explosion this year. and I think a cat got it. Anyway, I'm not sure shrews are harmful to gardens. According to this Extension bulletin they should be protected. Maybe it's a mole?

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/naturalresources/DD1139.html

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.

Just read this whole thread and found all the info so interesting!

stormyla - did they eat your roots of that plant?

I know that we have the shrews too. I thought they were voles until I finally looked them up. They hang out in back on the OTHER side of the fence and have paths under the leaf compost pile and out to the OTHER side of our neighbors fence and burrow along the fence. Now that I hear about all the damage they do, I'm glad they stay over on the other side of the fences! They do this because we have 2 German Shorthaired Pointers that LOVE to hunt them and drive them totally crazy staying just outside of reach. Somehow they manage to come up with one every now and again. I never knew they excreted a poison. Now I know why my dogs have that odd look on their faces when carrying them in their mouths to show me their prize. They spit them out like "blah-tooey"!

I don't think I'd care either how many bugs and mice they kill if they did that to my plants! They would have to go one way or another. Best of luck in your fight. Just a thought, what about baited mouse traps? Don't know if that would work but it'd be worth a try.