I Doused My New Cherry Tree…

A matter of life or death

For the tree that is…

I can’t remember the other details of the day, but when I went out front to check on the new cherry tree I had planted this spring, I was horrified.  More than half of the foliage was gone.

My first reaction was to check the anti-caterpillar tape I had applied to the trunk – nothing there.  Had it been ineffective?

No, it wasn’t caterpillars – there among the leaves were dozens, no hundreds of beetles munching on our new tree.

It became a battle of the bugs or our new tree.  What else could I do?

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A new tree

It started simply enough.  The old mountain ash that had anchored the corner of our front yard for many years had died off.  Sure, when it came time, I helped it out – but when you can push a tree over, it didn’t have long to go anyway…

I convinced my wife that a cherry tree would be a nice addition – we could get a self-pollinating sweet cherry tree that would fit the space and give us cherries.  I’d prune it to keep it small, but not quite dwarf.

After some research, we found a nice tree at a local supplier.  The worker that helped us out just happened to have a background running an orchard – of cherry trees – so we felt quite comfortable with his recommendations.

A good start

It took a bit of effort on my part, but I got the tree started out well.  The hole was double the size of the potted base of the tree, and I added some fertilizer to the soil that went back in.

I have kept a schedule of watering it every other day when we haven’t had rain.

By all accounts it has been doing well.

Some cherries

The tree even had a few buds on it when we brought it home – and after a couple weeks I noticed a couple cherries.  Hey – that’s a bonus.

But I didn’t net the tree and the cherries were gone a bit later, well before they were close to ripening.

Oh well – that’s ok – I didn’t want the tree to spend effort on producing cherries this year, I wanted it to get firmly established.

A bit of leaf munching

And then some time later I noticed that several of the leaves looked ragged – something’s been nibbling on my cherry tree.  A very Goldilocks moment –  I found one caterpillar still there!

A little research showed me that tent caterpillars could be a problem with cherry trees…

So I used some duct tape around the base and monitored the tree after that.

A bug orgy…

So with this background I was set to snap, so to speak, when I found the Japanese beetles covering the tree in July.

I’d taken the high road and let the birds have a couple cherries and then prevented the caterpillars from returning – only to see more than half of foliage stripped by this band of bugs.

And there they were at the end of the day – some were still eating, some were mating – they’d enjoyed a good day (for a bug).

A crushing blow

And that was more than I could take – they may well have given this new tree more than it could handle, and it certainly wouldn’t take more.

I removed and eliminated as many as I could but knowing that they would return the next day for a second meal, I planned the next blow…

Harsh remedies when called for…

We had an issue several years ago with ants getting into the house – The final solution that year was to spray the base of the house with an insecticide, and I pulled that bottle off the upper shelf of the garage.

One spray bottle and a bit of mixing later I was armed and ready to deal with the beetles.

And so I applied insect poison to the tree.

Probably something that professionals do “all the time”, but an action that I had tried to avoid.

To a point…

I’m ok with sharing:

I’ve planted tomatoes for several years and have yet to pick one. The deer seem to like the tops of them.

We added strawberries late last summer on a close-out sale but the rabbits eat them.

Nobody else seems to like the rhubarb, so that’s a winner.

And I’m trying a few stalks of corn this summer – we’ll see how that goes.

But if this cherry tree doesn’t get a chance to take hold and grow, nobody will be enjoying anything from it – and I’m not willing to feed bugs…

New growth

Well – it’s now a few days after the big event, and the tree is showing signs of fighting back.  It’s sending out some new leaves.

I’ll probably have to scale back the plans I had to prune it – this shock may be difficult to deal with. Several of the branches I had planned to prune happen to have more of the existing foliage on them.

Growing through adversity

“What does not kill me, makes me stronger.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

As with most things, I remain optimistic that the tree will overcome these difficulties. That it’ll dig its roots deeper, and strengthen itself from this trial.

Everybody faces challenges – and needs to grow because of them.

Have you been faced with a horde of bugs lately?-)

steve