[Homestead] Sericea Lespedeza

Leslie cayadopi at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 21 16:58:21 EDT 2009


Ouch that was a lot of trees gone.
 
Last year I did the first fertilizing on the pecan trees hand scattered like that and was pretty careful on the amount used, and built "moates" from the drip line towards the trunk to keep the water in the right place.  Later my brother was digging up some of the weeds, and carelessly exposed the roots and then tossed fertilizer on the roots and nearly killed the long established trees.  The leaves were horribly burned.  I wasn't sure if it was from the way he fertilzed or some other problem and called the extension guy out.  It was 2 things. He burned up the roots, and there was an iron deficiency (probably caused by flooding here last year).
 
This year I expanded the "moates" (to hold the water over the root zone) further out to allow for some expansion, and dug 8" deep holes 8 around each tree, and portioned out the fertilizer in the holes and buried them,,,, as somewhere during the last year I read that one of the ingredients in the fertilizer can evaporte (not the right word, but I think you can figure out what I mean).....  The first application is right when the leaf buds start, and the leaf coverage is really great this year, and I applied chelated iron, and most of the iron deficiency seems corrected, but I will add more iron next year.  2nd application of fertilizer (buried again) was done shortly after the blooms for the nuts.  This is an "off-year" for pecans, so I'm not expecting a big harvest, but I can see that the trees did recover from last year's mishap.
 
You've got deer,,,, I've got ground squirrels.  They are so brazen about stealing baby veggies.... that I found a 3" yellow squash (1-2 days old on the plant) dragged about 50' away.  The only thing that slows them down it that I put mouse traps near anything growing and the slightest movement makes them "snap" and scares them away.... LOL.  I have to reset them every few days.... so I guess their attention span is somewhat short.
 

--- On Tue, 7/21/09, EarthNSky <erthnsky at bellsouth.net> wrote:


 I was fertilizing the trees
and tossing the sand-like organic fertilizer in the root zone 


      


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