Project #365 Day 71 The Dying of the Lime Tree

dying key lime tree, Sri Lankadying key lime tree, Sri Lankadying key lime tree, Sri Lankadying key lime tree, Sri Lankadying key lime tree, Sri LankaMy poor lime tree. Okay, it’s really my mother in law’s lime tree – she planted it and cared for it for its first bunch of years. But in my heart, the lime tree is mine. 🙂 I love limes and wish this tree would reach the point where it was mature enough to bear fruit.

A year ago, it had a single flower. No fruit, though.

Unfortunately, at present, it’s dying. 🙁

First it was the papaya mealy bugs that I’ve written about many times. Those papaya mealy bugs are killing trees all over the country. And while the papaya mealy bug’s nemesis, a certain wasp from, I think, Mexico, has been released here, it takes time for the wasp to cover the entire island. And so far, in my garden at least, there is no evidence of the wasp killing off the papaya mealy bugs.

The lime tree was so badly infested that I trimmed off the worst of the leaves. Then a bunch of leaves grew  in and it seemed to be recovering. Then the papaya mealy bug returned and infested all those leaves. I trimmed off the worst of them, and then the rest of the leaves from the top of the tree died. Dead. All.

Except for one small stem near the bottom of the tree.

I looked closely and noticed something growing on the bark of the tree. I don’t know if those are baby papaya mealy bugs or something else entirely, but those white and purplish things were covering the bark on the upper two thirds of the bark.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I took my dishwashing sponge, squirted a huge amount of dish detergent into it, and covered the tree in detergent foam. And left it.

We had heavy rain later that night, so it eventually got washed off, but meanwhile, that detergent could help kill whatever that stuff is. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. 🙂

Author: LMAshton
Howdy! I'm a beginner artist, hobbyist photographer, kitchen witch, wanderer by nature, and hermit introvert. This is my blog feed. You can find my fediverse posts at https://a.farook.org/Laurie.

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