How Kill a pine tree?

Answer 1

I cannot find and do not know about any cure for this parasite.

The only treatment I have read about is to kill all visibly infected trees.

This can be done two ways.

One is by individually destroying each infected tree with a very large tracked vehicle that looks like an excavator, and is called a Fecon Bull Hog® -- see picture located on page at:

http://www.landandwater.com/features/vol49no6/vol49no6_1.php

This machine simply grinds up the tree in-place starting from the top down.

A ham-handed approach, no doubt about it, but it seems to at least contain the spread of the parasite.

The second way is to simply clear-cut all infected trees. Obviously not an acceptable solution if you live in a house among the trees and want to keep them.

So we are looking at a pretty grim situation.

The (relatively) good news is that from my own VERY LIMITED and purely PERSONAL experience over the past couple of years, you can manage the infection to a degree. First, clear out ALL underbrush from beneath the tree and for a good radius around it. The underbrush takes a lot of water and nutrients, so if you get rid of it, there's more for the tree. Second, get a good arborist to come in and remove the most heavily infected limbs. This has worked pretty well for a large Coulter pine (a "sugar pine" that has very large cones) about 50 feet tall on my property (which is located near Tehachapi in central-Southern California at about 4,500 foot elevation). The tree is NOT cured or mistletoe free by any means, but it looks MUCH better and I think it will survive for many years in a sort of "Mexican standoff" with the parasite.

I would dearly love and be willing to pay large dollars for some sort of chemical spray, pellets, granules, or whatever to kill this parasite.

I am resigned to probably having to wait for some development that hopefully will come out of the logging industry, which is really losing money on pine mistletoe. A consortium of logging companies might be able to fund research into finding a cure, and then recoup some of their investment from folks like me and you that want to save our few precious trees!

Answer 2

pure copper nail and not (plated) can actually kill a tree if the nail is long enough, usually the longest nails are the roof nails, you'd have to put hammer it in the roots and eventually the tree will get sick and die than you'd have to remove it

Answer 3

Cut It Down...