and then there was Thursday

Thursday I learned that these lovely creatures, Tent Caterpillars, were eating and killing all of our Italian Cypresses and pine trees. We have a LOT of very tall Italian Cypress trees surrounding our property and we would hate to lose them especially to a furry insect.

A very nice guy who specializes in this sort of thing had been inspecting the property behind us where the owner was complaining about the plethora of these. We had noticed an over abundance of these this year as well. I was just worried about all the moths that would be sure to follow and had no idea they ate trees and had settled in ours!

We did have one extra large tree that we saw was dying and thought it wasn't getting any water to it and had been giving it extra water but apparently that isn't the problem.

The nice bug man's solution. One of them is to spray the trees to the tune of a nifty thousand dollars.....YIKES! Wasn't exactly in the monthly budget this month.

He had a couple of other suggestions and we are going to get an arborist to come out and give us a second opinion....I will let you know....But watch those caterpillars. If you have them in your area and have pine or cypress trees he said you should spray them every February as a preventative measure. I will look up the name of the stuff. Ortho makes it.