Time to take a look at a few more of your great emailed gardening questions, and our first Local 12 emailer asks:

“Our oak tree is suddenly dripping a very foul smelling fluid, which is running down the side of the tree.  What is this and how can I save my tree?”

What you and your tree are experiencing, is called “slime flux” or “wet wood”.  It’s a bacterial disease inside the tree, which actually begins to ferment, build up pressure, and then looks for a place to escape…which is usually a crack in the branch unions, a pruning wound, or other injured areas.  The oozing of the sap is called Fluxing, and as you can see, this one is fluxing from where a branch was once removed.  Nothing you can do about it…nothing you can do to stop it…and it doesn’t kill the tree....just looks and smells really bad.

Our next emailer asks, “My pine trees are infested with borers.  There are almost perfect lines of borer holes all up and down the trunk.  What can I do to save my pines?”

Guess what?  Those perfect lines of holes are not from borers, but are from sapsuckers!  There are at least 7 species of woodpeckers that do this…basically they’re making holes in the bark deep enough for sap to flow, and then feed on the sap, a little inner bark, and an occasional bug or two.  The sapsucker holes are arranged in horizontal rings, or bands, or aligned in vertical rows.  In most cases, these holes do not present serious problems to trees, but trees in a migratory path, fed upon twice annually, can be damaged enough to cause stress and other infestations, including bores and diseases.  Problem is, there’s nothing you can to stop those sapsuckers…and you really wouldn’t want to!

Our last emailer is concerned about warty like structures found on their oak leaves.  These are leaf galls, and usually the result of insects, although a few are from a fungus.  The female adult stings the leaf buds, and as the grow, they form a nice hard shell around the insects eggs.  The eggs eventually hatch and leave the gall, the gall dries up and falls off the leaf, leaving a small hole in the leaf.

There are many types of leaf galls and they appear on many different types of tree leaves.  But again, they are strictly aesthetic, do no harm to the tree, and are rarely ever sprayed for.  Nothing to be concerned about.