Help! It has a disease
One of the reasons I love my job, is that I learn something every day. A few days ago, I was looking through one of my favorite books, Diseases of Trees and Shrubs (Sinclair, Lyon and Johnson…Comstock Publishing, 1987). Since I didn’t know the name of what I was looking for, I was looking at the pictures. I had one of those “Oh, that’s its name” moments from a picture. I logged it in the Names of Diseases file in my brain and kept on looking for the info I needed. Fast forward a few days. A customer just came in with a palm leaf and I knew the name of the beastie, right away, from my “ah, ha” moment. I Googled “False Smut” and hit images.
Granny, it’s not one of “those” diseases
False smut is a common disease on Date palms. The good thing is that it seldom needs treating. We get it here at the nursery when we place the palms too close together. It never seemed to really cause a problem, so I had just logged it as one of those “investigate it later” things. Well, the time had come. Graphiola phoenicis is a fungal disease, caused by high humidity and poor air circulation. The lower/oldest leaves are affected with strange-looking, little nodules that can look sort of hairy. This aggie website https://plantdiseasehandbook.tamu.edu/landscaping/trees/palm/ has some great pictures of False Smut, along with info on some other common palm diseases. If you spot this disease, you might be tempted to remove the effected leaves. You can…only if your palm is not suffering from a potassium deficiency, which looks like this: https://itp.lucidcentral.org/id/palms/symptoms/Potassium_Deficiency.htm. If you remove the leaves on a potassium deficient palm, it can make the deficiency much worse, opening up a whole can of worms. This web page is the most complete information I could find about False Smut. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pp140
Mantra of the week
“Not all strange things in my yard require chemical attack, sometimes Mother Nature is just doing her thing and that thing may not be not harmful”. Repeat 3 times a day until you do some research before you start spraying.