Hi GirlzinOK,

Welcome to the Oklahoma Forum and I hope we'll hear from you often! : )

I have been gardening all my life--almost 50 years--and have NEVER had toads burrow in soil enough to kill a plant, so I am shocked that this has happened to you.

Toads do like to burrow down in loose, cool soil to protect themselves from both heat and predators, so that might be what they were doing. And, I suppose there is a possibility that you had a major infestation of some kind of insects in the soil that the toads might have been trying to get to in order to eat the pests. Still, toads are a gardener's friend because they eat tons and tons of bugs, so pleae don't harm them.

I am not convinced that the burrowing of the toads killed your junipers OR that they burrowing would hurt the barberries. I've had armadillos and skunks dig large, substantial burrows that a full-grown cat could have fit into and even a large burrow that size did not kill the junipers.

Usually, when plants in a bed are struggling....and perhaps dying or at least looking like they are trying to die, it is most often a physiological problems like poorly draining soil, etc. So, let's try to analyze what might be going on with your plants in that particular bed.

1. Is your soil well-draining? If it is, even after a heavy rain, you would not have standing water on the soil surface for a prolonged period of time--maybe for an hour or so, but not much more than that. If your soil is slow-draining, though, you might have water stand in the bed for a day or two or three after a heavy rain. Usually, junipers CAN handle quite a lot of standing water, but some parts of Oklahoma have had wetter-than-usual years in both 2007 and 2008 and that can lead to plant death.

2.) Can you describe HOW your junipers died. Did they decline by showing browning of the foliage first and then dropping foilage? Did they die one limb at a time or did the whole plant die at once? Could you tell that the dead foliage was starting down low to the ground and moving up, or perhaps the opposite, that the upper branches died first and then the lower ones died later? Did you observe any insects on the plants? Sometimes spider mites are a problem on junipes.

3.) Grubs can be harmful, but some of them are the larval form of beneficial insects too. If you are familiar with the grub worms that eventually turn into Japanese Beetles or June Bugs, are those what you had? If so, those might have been part of the problem, but it is hard to say. I know they can be very destructive to grass roots, but I'm not sure they chew on shrub roots.

4.) Your usage of the broad-spectrum landscape and garden fungicide by Fertilome does concern me and may be the problem. If you still have the Fertilome bottle, read the label and see if the active anti-fungal ingredient is Daconil (Chlorathalonil). If so, there should be a warning label on the bottle telling you not to spray in hot and sunny weather. Why? Because Chlorathalonil and other similar fungicides can burn and kill plant foliage at temperatures over 80 degrees. (I used to say it occurred at temperatures over 90 degrees, but in our climate it seems to cause damage at "only" 80 degrees or so.)

Because I have had these kinds of foliar sprays damage plants (and, yes, even kill them), I never spray ANY thing chemical on my foliage at temps over 90, and very, very rarely at temps over 80.

The types of sprays that can cause damage in our hot temperatures include fungicides, summerweight horticultural oils, neem oil, organic OR checmical soap sprays, hot pepper waxes or sprays, garlic tea sprays (if very strong), etc.

The types of sprays that do not cause damage (or, at least, that I never have seen cause damage in our landscape) include compost tea, manure tea, Garrett Juice, Bt sprays or Spinosad sprays. Sometimes, if you spray a fungicide on plant foliage at night or on a cloudy day, you will think that the plants were not damaged. But, you often will not see the damage begin to appear until a couple of days after you sprayed, and it can take a week or more for the full scope of the damage to become apparent. Usually, if the fungicide has burnt the foliage, the plant has about a 50-50 chance of recovery, but it can take quite a while.

5.) Another possibility is that you might have used a weed and feed product in a lawn area near your bed. If so, there is a chance that the fertilizer spreader threw some of that weed-and-feed up into the bed and the broad-leafed weedkiller is doing its job and killing the plants. A lot of people use weed and feed products near trees and shrubs because they do not understand that the broadleaf weedkiller is supposed to kill everything but grass.

6) The last possibility I can think of is that somebody somewhere, and not necessarily you or anyone else on your property, used a glyphosate weedkiller like Round-Up and it drifted into your yard and landed on your plants. This may sound far-fetched, but it happens all the time. On a windy day, Round-up and similar glyposate-type products can drift in the air for up to a mile from where they were sprayed. I've seen it happen here in our yard.....where I knew a neighbor had a field or fenceline sprayed, and a couple of days later I noticed I had glyphosate damage even though the area sprayed was hundreds and hundreds of feet from my garden.

7) Finally, sometimes the best way to figure out if something underground killed your plant is to dig up the dead plant and look at the roots. Some things to look for would include:

a) Were the roots girdled? Girdling can occur if a plant stays in a container for a long time and the roots begin to grow in a circular pattern around the container. Then, when the plants are put in the ground, if you don't pull those roots apart and try to get them to spread out in different directions, the girdling-type growth continues and the plant literally chokes itself to death.

b) Were the plants planted too deeply in the ground? Both trees and shrubs need to be planted so that the flare of the plant's main trunk is above ground and not buried. Planting the root flare too deeply can weaken and even kill a plant.

c) Do the roots show evidence of root knot nematodes or any other nematode? If so, instead of having normal roots, you will see mis-shapen roots that have abnormal bulges and knots.

d) Are the roots thin and does it seem like they part of the roots have rotted, been eaten or otherwise "gone away". Such damage could indicate too much moisture (if they rotted), animal or grub damage (if they've been eaten) or nematode damage (knots and bulges).

There's a lot that can go wrong with plants, and I've tried to list everything that "could have" happened to your plants. Without seeing them, though, and not having watched them decline as you have, it is hard for me to guess long-distance what might have happened to them.

I have both junipers and barberries and have never seen anything really bother them.

So, think about what I wrote and let me know what you think is the most likely cause of your plant's problems. We can discuss it further, and other folks can share their ideas, and maybe if we all put our brains together, we can figure it out.

Good luck,

Dawn

Another informative and thorough analysis by Dawn. Thanks for that. You raise a couple points that I want to follow up on.

First, I finally managed to get my helmond pillar planted in a nice big container over the weekend. It looks a bit silly right now, as it is only about 18 nches tall and in such a huge container, but I'm happy with it. But I notced that when I went to plant it, it has white "stains" on the leaves that looked sort of like water stains. (?) I moistened my finger and rubbed it off on a few leaves, and I decided to sprinkle some water over the foliage, but when it dried these stains remained. Hopefully it's not a big deal.

Another question: since I just potted it, and since it is on the south side of my house in this heat and wind, should I water it everyday?

On a related subject, I planted a variegated boxwood shrub about 3 or 4 weeks ago, have been taking attentive care of it, and while it is nice and lush (if tiny), I have not seen any new growth. Is this normal? How long before it takes off? Your comment about root girdling worries me a bit, since I basically just dropped it in the ground w/out really taking any note of how the roots had grown in the container.

Finally--and I suppose I raise this problem b/c I just placed a container out front--my neighborhood has had a couple thefts of peoples' expensive plant containers and yard statues in recent weeks. The little old lady down the street had two neary life-sized angel statues stolen right off her front porch! Of course, now I'm paranoid about my container pot, even though it was not a terribly expensive one and there is a thorny bush planted in it. Neighborhood gossip is blaming workers, etc.. who cut through our neighborhood on their way to construction sites, and so on, but who knows... Our neighborhood is very nice, though not extravagent by any means, and while there are some "rich" people here, everyone is very hard-working, honest, and decent, and certainly not deserving of having their property stolen. Needless to say, we are all being extra viligant now, and the police are driving through with much more frequency (there are many cops in my neighborhood, which makes this even more surprising). Not sure why I mention this in this forum, other than to air my indignation about it, and perhaps ask folks to be on the look-out in pawn shops, garage sales and the like in the metro area for these kinds of things being sold.

GM

Good Evening Greenman,

To address your concerns:

1) A white powdery substance on foliage is almost always powdery mildew at this time of the year, especially in our heat and humidity. You can google to see a photo of powdery mildew. You could spray with a fungicide (but after reading what I wrote above about some fungicides burning foliage in this heat, you might not want to). You could spray with Spinosad, which is a biological agent and doesn't burn--or at least I've never heard of it burning foliage and haven't seen it burn foliage either. You could spray with a mild baking soda and water spray. Mix 1 T. baking soda with 1 gallon of water and then add just a couple of drops of liquid soap (not detergent) as a sticker-spreader agent. Spray foliage heavily--until spray drips off. I think this spray works merely because it slightly changes the pH on the leaf surface and the powdery mildew can't handle the change.

2) Since you planted your barberry in a hot month, just watch it carefully and plant it whenever the soil is dry. For the remainder of July and all of August, I'd stick a finger down a couple of inches into the soil DAILY and water if the soil is not moist. You don't want it to stay totally saturated and soggy, but you don't want it to dry out either. At this point, the plant probably won't grow much because the plant will be in survival mode. You should see good growth after the weather cools. And, if the temps. start exceeding 100 degrees, I'd check it early every morning and again every evening.

3) Your variegated boxwood also was planted when the weather was already getting pretty warm, so it may not show much new growth until cooler temperatures arrive in the fall. I wouldn't worry about it because there is a good chance it is making root growth right now and will make top growth once it has the roots in place to support that growth. If some of the common failure-to-thrive symptoms begin to appear--like burning of the leaf margins or tip burn of foliage or any other browning of foliage, or minor twig dieback, or wilting, then we probably would need to discuss this again and try to figure out if it was a late bout of transplant shock or something worse. Transplant shock, by the way, can show up any time in the first year of growth. IF your plant had root girdling, it probably would have caught your eye because it is rather obvious. Usually I see severe root girdling on plants that have been held an excessively long period of time in a container.....for example, on plants that didn't sell in the spring and are held in the small nursery pots all summer and into fall.

4) Garden theft is incredibly common and, unless you have a security camera, it is very hard to prove. (My husband is a long-time police officer, by the way.) You might want to tape a business card (encased in a zip-lock baggie) to the bottom of the pot, on the chance that, if they ever stole the container and it was recovered, it could at least be returned to you. Having a photo of it would help prove ownership as well. A LOT of recovered goods are never returned to their original owners because they aren't marked.

Lots of people have containers and garden ornamanents, including decorative fencing, trellises, arbors, etc. stolen. Not long ago, in a Texas town not too far from us, the local Master Gardeners group planted several hundred dollars worth of perennials and ornamental grasses a a Veterans memorial park, and came to the park one day to water the plants....and all the plants were gone. They's been dug up right out of the ground! A lot of urban gardeners often have produce stolen from their gardens as well. It happens. Other than good fencing and perhaps one of those motion-detector security lights, I don't know that there is much you can do to deter thefts.

Dawn

Any chance you had a gopher tunnel under and eat the roots of your plants, and the toads were just there by chance? They have killed many of my pecans this way.

I hate gophers. I have killed hundreds. One of the few things I would consider myself to be a near expert on. Just a thought!

OK, so I sprayed the helmond pillar with the baking soda and soap solution the other evening to treat the powdery mildew. Then it rained last night and this morning some of the leaves look like they're starting to burn (turning black, etc...) I'm beginning to think that I got "burned" at the nursery, which sold me a diseased shrub. (Really, how could they not know?) I also am now remembering that when I removed the shrub from the container to plant it, the container soil pretty much all fell away, leaving a bare root. There was no "root ball" to speak of. At this point I'm annyoyed that I spent 4 times as much on a supposedly better quality plant from a nursery, when I could have got a healthy one for 8 bucks at Home Despot. Sigh...

GM

Greenman, Even if the foliage burns, the plant should recover. I've neglected them (not, of course, on purpose) and let them get too dry when they were small. They got so dry twice that they went dormant and dropped all their leaves, but they recovered.

My favorite "plant tonic" for a plant that isn't doing as well as I'd like is to use liquid seaweed, liquid fish emulsion or a combination of the two to feed it. There seems to be something in them that "saves" or "revives" struggling plants.

When you buy a plant, it is always a "leap of faith" because you never know how it has been treated or maintained before you bought it. I agree with you though that you ought to get a "better" plant at a nursery, as opposed to one from a big box store, but that doesn't always happen, does it?

One of my pet peeves is nurseries that sell zone 8 or 9 plants to unsuspecting gardeners who live in zone 6 or 7. Maybe the employees hired by big box stores have no gardening experience and don't even understand the hardiness zones, but I expect better from a NURSERY and the people it hires.

Nothing is worse than having someone start a thread here about a plant they already bought and planted, and they are so excited about having it, and then you have to say "Well, it probably won't survive your winters". I always feel like such a mean person when that happens, but I'm always gonna tell people the truth. I'd rather have folks understand they have a plant that is marginally hardy so they won't blame themselves if it freezes.

Dawn

I have something that makes tunnels in my raised beds and in areas along my fence where I plant things. Not sure if it's toads or garden snakes or what. I have seen a snake only twice this year, one had Pearl's undivided attention under the porch, and the other was out by the grape arbor. If there's a tunnel right under a plant, the plant will usually die, if it's small, because its roots dry out in the tunnel. Unless of course you happen to get a lot of rain or you water at just the right times. I like the little toads and I think they eat a ton of insects so I don't do anything to try to kill them. But they do like to get into little pots of seedlings that I have sitting in trays on the floor of the porch. I have picked up a tray to carry it somewhere and discovered a toad sitting right in on top of one of the plants. Usually the plant they sit on dies. There's one that likes to hang out by where DH keeps his crushed Pepsi cans. The Pepsi draws the ants and the toad eats them.

Ilene,

Don't y'all have smart toads! LOL

Lately it has been so dry here that the toads and frogs are moving into my container plantings, which I water pretty much daily, and into the garden, which doesn't get watered but once a week (unless a rare rainshower occurs) but which is heavily mulched, thickly planted so it is shady, and cool.

I have little green frogs about the size of a half-dollar that like to sit on the corn leaves. I assume they may be sitting there and waiting for pests.

Even in my flat of small fall tomato plants, which of course I water daily, I have little tree frogs sitting in the paper cups. When I come to the plants to water them, the frogs cling to the outside of the paper cups.

We used to have tunneling pests (gophers and moles) but the cats and dogs have eliminated them.

Dawn