Last month I posted some photos of the awful state of my relatively new oak tree. See my June 9 post for some gory pictures. The diagnosis from the Extension agent was bacterial wet wood, for which there is no cure. He thinks the squirrels may have made things worse and suggested I spray it down with water to remove the "slime." Doing some research on it, I discovered that if the damage is not too extensive, the tree may recover. The oozing stopped and I was hoping for the best. But as you can now see, the top is dead. Should I cut that down and hope a new leader grows? Or is it just a matter of time before the rest goes? I spoke to the Extension agent again and his opinion is that if I left it, I would not be happy with its looks and it will still be stressed. So bottomline is to cut it down. :-(

As depressing as all that is, I'm still on cloud nine from my trip to the Seattle Bloggers Fling. I've got tons of photos to share and so it'll probably take several posts. Stay tuned!

This post was written by Jean McWeeney for my blog Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog. Copyright 2011. Please contact me for permission to copy, reproduce, scrape, etc.