Good Question! Fortunately, LB has only 2 ways of surviving for any length of time: on living solanceous plant tissue and in the soil. At least for now, the soil type is less common and has never been found in in the northeast. But no matter where you are you’re probably going to be fine, because both of those survival matrices contain moisture. As long as you let your planters dry out and remain dry over the winter you should be fine. Of course, adding some time in the bright sun would also be good – ultraviolet light and heat are both enemies of LB.

Wow, when you say frustration you aren’t kidding!

Here are a couple of thoughts:

Both of your problem plants are susceptible to diseases that flourish where drainage is poor: Entomosporium leaf spot in the case of the hawthorn and phytopthera root rot for the junipers (although they may have something else, the white filaments are no doubt fungus but not typical of phytopthera; I’m thinkin’ they may be something that was breaking down the oak leaves).

Which leads me to wonder if you chopped them up finely enough. Whole oak leaves can mat together and more or less turn into leather that takes forever to rot.

And that leads me to wonder whether the organic matter ever got a chance to break down into a useful soil amendment. If your soil has no air in it, all that material would just sit there.

If I were you, I would start over, possibly with raised beds/berms of higher quality soil. Compost the next batch of organic materials, then use the result as a thick mulch. Most plant feeder roots are in the top 8 inches or so of soil, so digging in the goodies actually puts them out of reach.

Sterilizing the soil probably won’t help, but choosing resistant varieties of hawthorn might well put you on the path to success. There’s a good list, from Alabama’s Auburn university, here.

Good luck!

I have only just recently begun to read thegreengrower and your written contributions. I have always considered myself a pretty good gardener in the very challenging Dallas, Texas area,… learning from experience mostly over 30+ years observation and experimentation. However, I have a problem I am unable to figure out.

Perhaps as many as 10 years ago I made huge garden areas in front of my house and mixed heavy material such as bags of mulches and oak leaves in an effort to improve (break-up) our black clay soil. My thought was by adding my idea of “organic” material there would be better nutrient and/or water availability as it decomposed. I had planted ground hugging Blue carpet juniper and Indian Hawthorn as main plantings.

After initial success (about two years) the junipers began huge die offs. As they were removed, I noticed fuzzy white looking areas on the root systems and widespread in the soil. The Hawthorn, since I got them as healthy 1-gallon specimens, have never grown full and healthy looking. Their leaves start out very green after the spring bloom, then the year-old growth gets spots yellow and brown, with the affected leaves falling off soon after losing all the green.

This reoccurring yearly process leaves very leggy and unhealthy looking plants, that after 10 years, have never grown larger than two feet in spindly diameter. Furthermore, I can not seem to get anything to flourish in my garden (more like bare black desert waste land). A couple of Nana Nandina and Jap Yew are holding up O K in exception. Amounts of water, small or large, is of no apparent help …

Do you have ANY idea what is happening? Mold, Fungus, Disease, Bugs, Bacterium??? Do you have any ideas of specific products I could use to improve the possible situation, remaining plants or soil and where I could purchase it? Do I need to start over, sterilize the soil? I originally thought both of these type of shrubs were strong evergreens as I see them used in commercial settings, they can get huge. I could use some help if you can, please! Preferably not too expensive!

Thank you in advance,
Frustrated in Dallas, Patrick

I emailed this info to High Mowing, whom I bought the original seed from.

Thanks for the tip about Matt’s Wild Cherry – another vote for cherry tomatoes. Not something I think of as suitable for preserving, but this year…

And last night Emma ( more about her soon) made a very nice simple pasta dish: rigatoni with a ton of cherry tomatoes that had been halved and briefly sauteed in olive oil with lots of garlic. So I guess we can work on thinking up more of those, and maybe this’ll be a year for Tomato Figs – candied; they’re better than they sound although not exactly versatile.

As for the prophylactic Serenade, I’m not waiting until next year – too many other fungusy things still likely to hit the cucurbits, beans, zinnias etc., and B. subtilis is listed for a great many of them. Each time I make up a batch for the tomatoes I make it big enough to cover just about everything.