One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered

by Edward J. Wickson

The best thing for grasshoppers is to fix up a lot of poison. This is made in the proportion of 40 pounds of bran, 2 pounds of molasses and 5 of arsenic, mixed together as a mash. They will take this wherever they find it, even when nice green leaves are close by, but it has to be kept moist. Grasshoppers can also be reduced by driving a "hopper doser" over ground where they are. This is made somewhat like a Fresno scraper, but is much longer and the bottom is covered with crude oil. When disturbed the hoppers jump up and fall into the oil. Besides the poison, you should also protect the trunk of the tree to prevent the hoppers from climbing up it. This can be done by applying tree tanglefoot, or putting on one of the tree guards that prevent climbing insects from passing up to the leaves. The combination of poison and tree guards will give you about all the protection you need.

Sunburn and Borers.

Please state the best remedy for keeping the borer out of young fruit trees.

Sunburn can be prevented in many ways. The manufactured tree-protectors are good if they are light colored and are kept in place so that the sun does not scald above or below them. Wrapping spirally with narrow strips of burlap, torn from old grain sacks, from the base to the forking of the branches, is also good. A very effective and widely used method is to apply a good durable whitewash which may be made of 30 pounds of lime, 4 pounds of tallow and 5 pounds of salt, adding the salt to the water used in slaking the lime, stirring in the tallow while the slaking is in progress and hot, and then adding water to thin the wash so that it will work well with pump or brush.

Gumming of Prune Trees.

I write to ask for information concerning my prune trees. They are from two to six years old and the gum is exuding from them. As I notice the branches dying I cut them out, but this doesn't seem to save the tree. I would appreciate any information you can give me.

This is a pretty hard matter to diagnose from a distance. There is a good probability that the trouble is caused by sunburn, a point you could determine on inspection. Whitewash would be a protection against this and more or less of a cure also. Furthermore, borers may be the cause, which can be determined by examining the points where the gum exudes, seeing if any wood grains are present. These borers should be dug out and whitewash applied, which latter also protects against this trouble. Lastly, your ground may be drying out, which also you can determine and remedy.

Borers in Olive Twigs.

There are quite a number of olive trees in this locality that have something wrong with them. They make a growth of five or six inches and the center twig dies back, then it sprouts out at the sides and makes another growth in the same way. This makes a thick bush instead of the tree coming up as it should.

The dying back is caused by a beetle which bores into the twigs. The twigs above the point where the beetle enters dies and then, of course, buds come out from healthy wood below. No treatment has been devised against it, though its breeding ground is limited if all dead wood and brush and litter is cleaned up and twigs are cut off below the point of injury whenever the work of the insect is seen.