Imagine looking out at your favorite majestic maple tree — the one you’ve loved for years — and it looks sick.

It's usually vibrant green summer leaves that look pale yellow, or even white.

What’s wrong with it? Probably iron chlorosis, an iron deficiency that often strikes maple and aspen trees here in Idaho.

Can you save it? Could you have prevented this problem in the first place?

Jump to Section

• First, What Common Landscape Diseases Can Damage Your Trees and Plants?
• Can Plant Health Care Prevent Disease and Plant Death?
• Plant Health Care Practices That Target Plant-Eating Pests
• Is Plant Health Care Worth the Price?
• Landscape Replacement: How Much Does Plant Material Cost?
• Average Plant Health Care Prices
•  Get Protective Plant Health Care with Lawn Buddies 

Can plant health care prevent diseases and dead plants? It can.

A good plant health care program helps protect your leafy investments, delivering food and fixes for diseases and insects that can quickly damage and even kill a once-healthy tree or shrub. Including your precious maple.

Rex Permann, project manager at Lawn Buddies, explains how plant health care can save you money, as it can save your ailing tree or shrub.

First, What Common Landscape Diseases Can Damage Your Trees and Plants?

Trees and woody shrubs face challenging diseases. Without the right care, landscape plants in Idaho Falls can be especially susceptible to a number of plant diseases:

Marssonina Leaf Spot 

This fungal disease strikes aspen, poplar and cottonwood trees — among the most common trees here in Idaho.

You might notice brown spots with yellow halos on your tree’s leaves that merge together, forming big brown blotches.

This plant disease doesn't usually kill trees, but it weakens them over time.

Rhizosphaera Needle Cast

This fungal disease affects spruce trees, especially Colorado blue spruce, causing their needles to turn yellow, then brown and eventually fall off.

Trees already weak from drought or other stresses are more likely to be hit.

Powdery Mildew

If you notice blotches on the leaves of your tree, plant or shrub that look like fuzzy white felt, this common landscape disease is probably the cause.

Here in Idaho, this fungal disease commonly affects oak, maple, magnolia, dogwood, crabapple and catalpa trees.

Fire Blight

This bacterial disease is as bad as it sounds. It’s super destructive for pear and apple trees, killing the blossoms, fruit, branches and ultimately the entire tree.

Fire blight starts as cankers in the tree’s tissue, lingering dormant over the winter. Then, once the tree blooms in the spring, the infection spreads throughout the tree.

Iron Chlorosis

Iron chlorosis, as we noted earlier, is a nutrient deficiency that often strikes Idaho’s aspen and maple trees.

It happens when trees can’t absorb all the nutrients they need from the soil. Trees with iron chlorosis have yellowing leaves that never quite get green.

Can Plant Health Care Prevent Disease and Plant Death?

If you have a stressed and suffering tree, you want to fix it as fast as possible.

That means going straight to its roots.

Deep-root tree fertilization injects nutrients directly to your stressed tree's roots, rather than spreading them on the surface.

By injecting fertilizer under high pressure with a wand inserted into the soil, nutrients like phosphorus and iron can reach the deepest tree roots quickly, feeding your tree from the roots up. Your ailing tree gets an immediate boost.

Over time, the healing nutrients circulate from the roots through the rest of your tree.

This treatment is especially needed here in Idaho, says Rex Permann, project manager at Lawn Buddies.

“The soil in Idaho is very alkaline,” Permann says. “There aren’t a lot of nutrients in the soil to keep trees healthy and strong. You want the roots to grow deep so they get the nutrients they need.”

Lawn Buddies offers deep root fertilizer in spring and fall, he says. — when trees absorb most of their nutrients.

“Deep root fertilization also helps trees combat insects that are trying to eat them alive,” Permann says. A healthy, well-fed tree can stand strong against plant diseases in Idaho and destructive insects.

Beyond DRF, Tree Injections act like shots for your trees. They treat diseases and insects by delivering treatment directly into the tree trunk, which is quickly taken up by the vascular system and distributed throughout the tree.

This direct treatment works faster and is more effective than spray treatments.

“Trees that have a pretty gnarly disease or bugs trying to eat them from the inside out need attention ASAP to help save that tree before it dies,” Permann says.

Here at Lawn Buddies, we often use tree injections to treat plant diseases in Idaho, such as fire blight, and to treat maple trees suffering from iron chlorosis.

Tree injections help strengthen your tree against these diseases and destructive pests, Permann says. The injections deliver micronutrients directly into the stressed tree, quickly replenishing its nutrient levels.

“Trees can get help pretty quickly,” Permann says.

It involves just one treatment that lasts for a whole year.

Plant Health Care Practices That Target Plant-Eating Pests

Hungry insects can quickly damage a once-healthy tree or shrub. Quiet, sneaky, and really hungry, they’re devouring your landscaping without you even knowing they’re out there.

Leaf miners puncture your tree or shrub’s leaves to suck out the juices, Permann says, then lay eggs that hatch into hungry larvae that continue the damage.

If you notice squiggly trails in your plant’s leaves, that’s from leaf miner larvae creating tunnels as they munch. They’re bad news.

Meanwhile, borers like the bronze birch borer do their major damage as larvae, too, before you even know they're attacking your tree. Early treatment of plant health careis crucial.

The female borer deposits her eggs under cracks and crevices of tree bark. The eggs hatch in a couple of weeks, and the hungry larvae start tunneling into your tree tissue.

These borers typically attack stressed, weakened trees.

Tiny spider mites feed on plants by piercing their leaves and sucking out the juices. You can barely even see them without a magnifying glass, but their damage can be devastating.

Aphids are sap-sucking insects that weaken plants by feeding on tender new growth, causing leaves to turn yellow and become deformed. They’re among the most common damaging insects in Idaho.

If you tell a plant pro that you don’t think you have aphids, they’ll say, “Yes, you do.”

What to do about all these worrisome bugs? Plant health care can help.

A one-two punch of systemic injections plus foliar treatments on leaves can banish the bugs trying to destroy your trees.

Systemic insecticides injected into your trees in the spring and fall treat them from within, while spray treatments three times a year zap any bugs crawling on your trees. The foliage spray has a residual effect, too, lasting for 30 days to deter any hungry invaders.

It’s a lot easier to prevent bugs than to treat them after they show up.

One of the best features of plant health care is its preventive approach. Why stress over damaging bugs when you can prevent them in the first place?

Here are two ways plant health care beats bugs to the punch:

1. Dormant Oil

Don’t let the word dormant fool you. This stuff really works.

Dormant Oil for trees and shrubs kills destructive insects that love to lay eggs.

“Whatever bugs have laid eggs in trees when they’re dormant, the oil suffocates them before the trees start to bud,” Permann says. “So the tree can grow healthy and strong."

“Basically, we beat them to it before the bugs wake up in the spring.”

Also called horticultural oil spray, it’s a highly refined petroleum product that suffocates insects and insect eggs that have overwintered on trees and shrubs.

The oil kills any lingering insects as well as their eggs, so they won’t hatch in the spring.

Lawn Buddies technicians apply the oil spray in early spring while your trees and shrubs are still dormant.

“We mostly use dormant oil on maples and fruit trees, or shrubs if a customer has problems with insects,” Permann says.

“Lots of people have worms in their fruit trees,” he says. A dormant oil application in spring can help.

2. Pine Weevil Spray

Pine weevil oil works like dormant oil, Permann says, but targets the white pine weevil. Despite its name, this destructive pest often damages spruce trees, such as Colorado and Norway spruce.

Adult white pine weevils climb to the top of the tree to feed and lay eggs in the spring.

When the eggs hatch, the hungry larvae kill the top 2-3 years of growth, creating a deformed shepherd’s hook shape.

The trick is to spray the oil at the top of the tree on its youngest branches, since this is where the weevils gather.

Is Plant Health Care Worth the Cost?

It is, if it saves your ailing tree or shrub.

“You might say, ‘I don’t want to spend the extra money on deep root fertilizer,’” Permann says. “But if your tree dies and you suddenly have to spend $2,000 to replace a tree, that hundred or two hundred dollars for deep root fertilizer will hurt your wallet a lot less.”

Here’s a look at the cost of plant health care vs the cost of replacing a dead tree or shrub:

Cost of Landscape Replacement: How Much Does Plant Material Cost?

If you lose a plant, shrub or tree to disease or insect invasion, the cost to replace it varies widely, Permann says, depending on the plant's type and size.

“As far as tree replacement costs, they can range anywhere from $400 to $4,000 per tree, depending on the type of tree and how big it is,” he says.

Need a new shrub? Expect to spend $14-$50 for small shrubs, $35-150 for medium shrubs and $75-$400 for large shrubs, he says.

The Average Cost of Preventive Plant Health Care

In most cases, the cost of plant health care is less than the cost of replacing a tree or shrub.

Many plant health care services cost between $50 and $200.

You might recall your grandmother saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

She was right.

Sure, you can add up the actual cost of the trees and shrubs you lose to insects or disease.

But the value of your landscaping goes beyond the dollar signs.

A professional, well-maintained landscape increases your home’s value, potentially adding 15 to 20 percent to its price if you sell.

Curb appeal is crucial to the first impression your home makes.

But your landscaping has even more value to you.

Think about that majestic maple that magically announces the arrival of fall each year with its spectacular crimson leaves. And it wouldn’t seem like spring without your stunning pink azaleas or your cheerful yellow forsythia.

Maybe your beloved roses are from clippings your grandmother gave you. Was your hydrangea with its fluffy blue blooms a Mother’s Day gift?

We have emotional connections to our gardens.

Do you really want to lose any part of yours? An investment in plant health care protects your precious plants.

Get Protective Plant Health Care with Lawn Buddies

Don’t let invasive insects or ugly diseases endanger the trees and shrubs you love.

Skilled plant health care in Idaho Falls, Pocatello, and Rexburg keeps your landscaping healthy and quickly fixes problems if they arise.

Expert plant health care is available to our Idaho Falls customers enrolled in our full-service lawn care program.

The first step is to sign up for our 6-step complete lawn care program.

You’ll be glad you did.

Choose an Idaho Falls professional lawn care service that makes it easy, bundling your yard’s most-needed treatments into one convenient, no-fuss plan.

Got a few minutes? That’s all you need to get started. Just fill out the form on this page, call us at (208) 656-9131 or read more about our services. Then you can kick back and relax in your healthy, thriving yard.