ken..thanks for the link..I didn't know the term mast..I didn't post a pic of one but I'm getting stems with clumps of seeds attached..they're easy to grab so I've picked up a lot of those..I've found seeds in my hair!..it's making the garden so messy I haven't been taking as many pics..oh well mother nature wins again..

So you plan on losing tree and paying to remove it? Its funner kicking EAB in their big Ash, easy and cheap as fertilizing tree until danger from large borer populations passes locally. Especially if removal over $500 or plan on selling property in few yrs, $30 worth of generic drench in april great alt option. Any treated tree still declining had not been inoculated right. But if having felled, Ash one of best firewood species!

Normal occasional masting years suddenly produced by local ash trees had been a way confusing opportunistic browsers similar to 17 year cicadas. But what we are witnessing today is caused both by stressed trees which commonly kick into heavy seed production. And survival mode facing total extant of every tree over age six, and functional extinction prevention to produce as much offspring. Which sapplings termed orphans containing last of ancient locally evolved DNA. EAB will attack those before reaching their own seeding age of 10 for green, and age 20 for white ash.

If one plans on preserving wild seeds to help bring back Ash uniquly evolving over last 160 million yrs to your local woods, collect while still on tree as seeds that hit ground get killed off by seed nematodes that will kill off all the good seeds collected too. In nature samaras,or Ash keys can germinate some four years later.

I started this post July 7th last year..the ash seeds were crazy..I don't have ash seeds falling yet..my trees are doing well..we injected the trees ourselves last year..we treated a couple of previously untreated trees because we had enough chemical and the trees still had their canopies..I think they were "in a bubble" surrounded by my treated trees..we did selective treatments when we paid an arborist to treat them..we still treated almost all of our trees..it's cheaper now that we can do it and as it turns out the amount of chemical needed to treat all of the trees uses all of the bottles we purchased rather than keeping some leftover chemical for future use..sad to see so many dead trees everywhere I go..

what did you treat them

Siberian elms upwind of me in neighbor's yard does that to my lot every year, clogging up gutters.

You should see the millions of syringa vulgaris seedlings popping up all over everywhere in my yard and around me.