White Oak is Dropping Too Many Acorns!

Mike in Massillon says, “hi, good morning. I have a couple of questions. We have a pretty large white oak and some of it overhangs our deck and it’s got a ton of acorns dropping prematurely, just making the biggest mess. It’s been doing this probably for the last three years or so. I mean, other than that, the tree’s healthy. Is that a normal thing for them to do?”

So this year, I would say yes, maybe not so much the last two years. You can fertilize even an older tree like that. Making sure the tree has good food for itself is always going to help keep the tree healthy. The trees are a lot like people. If we’re not eating properly, not taking the right nutrition in, then we’re more likely to get sick. The same thing happens to the trees. 

This year, what we found happened with a lot of the plant material. It grew leaves bigger than it could support because we were so cool and so rainy for so long that the plant overgrew and now it can’t support all that. So like a couple of weeks ago, birch and serviceberry were the first to react and we noticed them dropping leaves like we normally see in August, September, like the inside foliage was coming down much, much, much earlier. I mean, it was happening at the end of June.

So we normally don’t see that, but that’s, again, it’s an environmental thing. It’s not something that should happen again next year. It’s just something that we’re experiencing this year.

Yeah, so the tree, if it doesn’t need it to create food for itself, sometimes it will forgo continuing to develop those acorns. If you want to bring a picture of the tree in and maybe a few samples of the leaves, we can check and make sure there’s not something else going on that maybe you’re not noticing.

That picture reeled up close to the tree and then a picture really far back from the tree and then maybe a few leaves. And we can take a look at that and see if there’s anything other than the acorns dropping, going on that might cause them to drop.

‘My second question, I have a rosebush. I don’t know what variety it is, but it’s as healthy as I’ve ever seen it this spring. Multiple blooms. I fertilized it pretty well. But now some of the leaves are turning brown on the edges and some of them are actually dropping off. Seems like they’re dying. Is there anything specifically you think’s attacking it? I know there’s Japanese beetles on it now, but…’

Yeah, and then when they take a bite out of the leaf, sometimes it stresses the plant. And the plant says, okay, this leaf’s not making me as much food anymore because it can’t do the photosynthesis because part of the leaf’s missing and it will drop those leaves. We do recommend spraying. We have seen some Japanese beetles this year. You can spray like a three-in-one product and it’ll protect it from fungus, which we also know is pretty prevalent because of all the rain this year. And it also protects it from hundreds of different kinds of insects. It’s an all-purpose spray, but you would only put that on in the evening hours when the temperature is cooling down.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).