My Fine Line Holly has a leaf disease - see pictures

[Raym]

It is Saturday am and I really need to doctor my fine line holly bushes. The disease showed up about two weeks ago. 4 days ago I posted this without pictures and TheLorax thought it might be sooty mold or tar spot. After I posted pictues he never came back with more info.

Does anyone know what I have and how to teat it? I see tiny yellow somethings on the underneath side of the leaves and the leaving are brown with black veins.

Thanks.

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[Raym]

Well, I just sprayed the infected area with Bayer Advanced Complete Insect Killer for Gardens. Every bug that was mentioned should be killed by this stuff. I will repeat an application in a week and hope for the best. Thanks everyone.

[TheLorax]

Hey Raym,
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7903

I left for out of town the morning before you private messaged me with additional photos or I would have replied sooner. It might be best to post supplemental photos directly into a thread because the more people getting a good look-see, the better. Private messages hide them from public view. The beauty of forums is that one hopefully gets lots of good leads to follow from more than just one other gardener.

The product you chose is an insecticide and a systemic to boot. It's going to kill off beneficials that may very well have been keeping opportunistic pests under some semblance of control. The Bayer Advanced Complete Insect Killer for Gardens supposedly states on the label that it controls the following:

Kills:
Annual Bluegrass weevil (hyperodes weevil), Ants, Armyworms, Billbugs, Black turfgrass Ataenius, Centipedes, Chiggers, Chinch Bugs, Cockroaches, Crickets, Cutworms, Digger Wasps (Cicada killer), Earwigs, European crane fly larvae, Fire Ants, Fleas, Grasshoppers, Leafhoppers, Mealybugs, Millipedes, Mole Crickets, Mosquitoes, Pillbugs, Scorpions, Sod webworms (lawn moths), Sowbugs, Spiders, Termites*, Ticks (including deer ticks), White Grubs (including larvae of Asiatic Garden Beetle, Black Turfgrass Ataenius, Chafers, Japanese Beetles, May or June Beetles, and Oriental Beetles)

* This product will kill workers and winged reproductive forms of termites that enter into the treated areas. Use of this type of product to kill termites should not be considered a substitute for soil treatment of subterranean termites done by a professional pest control operator.

Unfortunately, I believe you may have a fungus and a hard bodied scale problem and the product you chose will not treat fungal infections and does not list scale as being a pest it kills on the label although mealy bugs were listed. If you purchased the granule product, you might want to take a shop vac out to the area and suck up the granules. If you used a spray, might not be a good idea to spray again. Maybe wait a week or so and consider trying an appropriate horticultural oil spray combined with baking soda?

Also too, the active ingredient in Bayer Advanced Complete Insect Killer for Gardens is Imidacloprid. Imidacloprid is carcinogenic and believed to be "weakly" mutagenic-
https://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/haloxyfop-methylparathion/imidacloprid-ext.html
The other active ingredient in the Bayer product is Beta-cyfluthrin. That's a suspected endocrine disruptor and is toxic. It may be determined to be carcinogenic as well as a ground water contaminant at some point in time.

[opabinia51]

Hi Raym,

well what you have done is killed every insect that was susceptible to the poison that you used and you also killed all of the pathogenic and beneficial micro and macroflora and fauna living on the leaves and stems of you plant.

Disease usually occurs when one or more of the afore mentioned organisms has a sudden increase in population number for one reason or another.

What is happening now on your plant is most of the organisms are now dead and a very few are now still alive and most likely these few are resistant to whatever poison that you used. If they happen to be the disease causing organisms, you are in a bit of a pickle.

In nature most insects and micro and macro flora and fauna are actually benign or beneficial and a few are either opportunistic pathogens or outright pathogens. The benign and especially the beneficials keep the paothegenic populations in balance.

So, it's actually much better to try to increase the variabilty in the animals, plants, fungi and bacteria growing on, in and around your plants. In fact, the fungi that grow in your soil will often help feed your plants. And most micro organisms growing on your plants actually fight disease.

Solution: Spray your plants with an aerated compost tea made from non sterilized compost placed in a bucket or barrel and bubbled with water. ( A little aquarium pump works great.)

Also, with the insecticide that you used: it will have had harsh effects on local bee populations as well. Bees in North America are under serious stress right now and farmers are having a lot of trouble finding pollinators for their crops. So, the broad based use of poisons in home gardens should not be used for economic as well as ecological reasons as well.

[mikeruffold]

Hmm, I remember experiencing something similar... but unfortunately I didn't know what to do and lost the plant ;( We thought it might be termites and called a [url=https://termiteexterminationforbeginners.blogspot.com]termite extermination[/url] company.

Mike