Urgent! Very old lemon tree! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi everyone. I dont know if you remember me at all? I wrote to you all about me new lemon trees having no leaves and wooded tips. I was given fantastic information by you all! Thank so much for those who took the time to write and help. I did what you said, took all the bark away from the plants, trimmed all the tips off and stopped watering all together! Still havent watered them and they are looking great! Fresh, green healthy leaves all over my lemon, lime, orange and mandarine trees! Now for a different matter. When we moved into our house there was/is an old lemon tree, perhaps as old as the house, 35 years old. It is 2 metres high and quite bushy. When we arrived we had to cut away alot of dead tips and whole branches. The tree stopped having brown tips but we noticed black branches, like a sooty black with ashy like spots, also black spot over the leaves. This has gotten worse over the year and is nearly all over the tree. We havent had any fruit for 10 month and there are only 3 new lemons on now!!! Please could anyone give us advice to save the life of this old, valuable lemon tree. Thank you,
Your tree has sooty mold. Sooty mold does not actually hurt the tree, but the black mold on the leaves reduces the leaf's photosynthesis, thus reduces the tree's food supply. Sooty mold is a mold that develops on the excrement of insects, that are infesting your tree. Sooty mold can be washed from the tree, If you will spray the affected tree with a horticultural oil, wait 1/2 hour then wash the tree down with your garden hose, the sooty mold will come off a lot easier. When spraying a citrus tree, always spray early in the morning of later in the afternoon, NEVER spray a citrus tree in the heat of the day. You can also spray at any time on a overcast cloudy day. BTW the horticultural oil will also kill the insects that were the original cause of the mold. Horticultural oils are completely 100 percent safe, and completely non toxic. - Millet
Thanks so much for that, I found it really hard to look up on line to see what we should do as I will not use chemicals and different sprays that never work anyway. Thanks again millet, what would we all do without your advice?! Kind regards, Tracey. P.S. We just bought a Goji Berry plant, fingers crossed with that one!
