All the leaves are brown.....

and the sky is blue........

(apologies to the music fans)


For some reason, the current state of things, has prompted that snippet of song into an ear worm of major proportions. Think this through:

In May this year, we had roughly six weeks of very cool, dark, and cloudy weather.

When did the bees show up in earnest at your place?  If you are like me, they never really did. Had no pollinators whatsoever except for the occasional bumble bee, lost from a local beekeeper. But native bees? None until August.

Had plenty of robins early on, but they took off in early June. Where did they go?

Gardening reports have the season as mixed, at best.  Some were fortunate and had a great year, but many folks, like myself, had a marginally productive year-despite added amendments and care.  Even my raspberry patch, reliable for 5 to 7 gallons of great berries every season-produced only a fraction of normal.

And then there are the trees.  Didn't it seem like things were turning color a little too soon?  But if you take a really close look at those birch trees.....well, I think we have a problem. Maybe a big problem, on the heels of the huge spruce bark beetle kill off of our local spruce. 

Our local birch trees have been subject to attacks by a pest known as "birch leaf miner" for some years now. This is what produced the bare tree tops in a wide swath of the Valley.  In some areas, the entire tops of the trees are dead-including, seemingly, a portion of the main trunk. On my own property, I have some that appear dead for the upper ten feet or so and looking around my travels, I see many birch showing the same effects of "whatever it is". 

And there is something else. The trees are not the bright and cheerful sunny yellow and vibrant orange that a combination of a good frost and dropping sap provides.  Nope, if you check closely, you will see some have leaves that are browning at the *branch*. At the stem where they attach to the limb. In fact. some of the leaves affected appear nearly singed. 

At first I thought it had to be something specific to our several birch species...but nope, the same thing shows on my own well tended lilac shrubs.  The leaves are browning from the stem outwards. There is no other symptom of disease or distress that I can identify. These shrubs are well watered, pruned every two years, and get at least some fertilizer from being planted in the lawn.

All the leaves are brown....and the sky is blue.......

.........??