It's always autumn! Help, I'm always raking leaves up...

[petitpasa]

Hi,
I have a tree in my front yard that blooms beautiful little pink flowers in the spring and that bears a little red fruit the rest of the green season.

Unfortunately, there are always leaves falling off the tree. They turn orange, red, brown and are spotted. I do not know what is causing this.

Can anyone help me identify the problem and or solutions?

Still raking up leaves in July, cordially,
Annette

[imafan26]

Well I do have three trees that do that, I used to have four but I got tired of raking leaves off the driveway. Mine are plumerias, they drop leaves now and again but will drop everything, literally in the winter. I replaced the plumeria by the driveway with an E. cotonifolia. I prune it every couple of months to maintain its shape, but it does not drop leaves.

Most of my other trees don't lose a lot of leaves and some of the trees have very small leaves that I just leave on the ground. Most of the trees I have kept do not reseed easily, the ones that do, I have to cut off the seed pods before they become an issue and I have been cutting down the McArthur palms one by one to reduce them because I only have 2 years to pick out the seedlings before they become a problem. Palms produce 100's of seedlings every year.

Do you really want that tree? If not, consider replacing it with a tree that is less work.

[rainbowgardener]

I'm thinking your tree might be a crabapple tree. Does it look like this:



It should not be dropping significant amounts of leaves this time of year. You didn't say where you are located. Hardly any gardening questions can be answered without knowing that.

Commonest thing that would cause leaves to brown and drop is drought. If you are in the majority of the US that is having hot and dry (as opposed to where I am where we are getting all the rain you are missing), your tree probably just needs more water, probably a LOT more water. You don't want to water the surface when you water it, you want to put soaker hose or drip hose on it and run it for at least 24 hrs and get the water as deep as you can. Do that once a week as long as the weather continues hot and dry.

[petitpasa]

I am in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I'm not sure that it is a crab apple tree but I will try to identify it with Leafsnap. Maybe the watering will help, thanks. I'll see.

[petitpasa]

Here are a couple of pics of the spotted leaves...