I cant get to your links, but i can tell you that you need to wait till very early spring to prune them severly. Unless someone comes along and says otherwise, thats what i have always been taught. Someone will also come answer you about the aphids soon. But i definitely would not do any more pruning, even without looking at your pictures.

Emma

Hi Erod,

To get to the links you have to copy and paste. I don't know how to make text appear as a clickable link, and one of these days I need to learn to post pictures.

They got pruned pretty hard- but all I can say in my defense is they were starting to suffer badly from pests and rotting leaves etc in the central parts as there was NO air circulation.

My FIL who has been growing them for donkeys years told me today- You can prune em whenever you want ain't nothing will kill em- his words...I did look at his and they look ok. They are fabulous gardeners.

The reason i say dont prune in the fall, is that pruning usually promotes new growth and you usually dont want new growth in the fall with cold weather coming. Pruning in the summer isnt bad, ive done it, but i wouldnt do it in the fall. I would find whatever you need to spray it with to kill the pests and then do your heavy pruning in early spring.

I also wonder about spraying the tree/shrub with a pesticide if it has been freshly pruned and has an open "wound". It might be just fine, but it might not.

There are a lot of people on here much more knowledgable than i am, im just saying what i would probably do.

The great thing about this site is i learn something from every thread. Sometimes i change the way ive been doing things, and sometimes i just stick with what has always worked for me.

Most people post late evening, so dont get discouraged, you will get more answers.

Also, just above your username where you are posting your message, it will say image file to upload, that is where you upload a pic. I dont use facebook so i cant look at your pics, but again, you will get more answers tonight or in the morning.

Hi Angie - I guess because I am not your FB friend I cannot look at your links. It says I do not have permission to see your pics.

Angie, Well at least manslaughter is not as serious as murder. Seriously, though, sometimes you just have to do what you have to do and I don't think y'all have harmed the crape myrtle at all.

I would go ahead and cut out the dead trunk.

I don't know that I'd say y'all went too far in your efforts to improve the health of your crape myrtle. It looks pretty good right now.

The population of crape myrtle aphids usually peaks in late July and early August. Sometimes when the infestation is especially heavy, the lady bugs do have a hard time keeping up with all the aphids. I am glad you didn't spray anything that would hurt the lady bugs because they are incredibly beneficial. In the future, you can simply knock the apids off the plants with a sharp stream of water at high pressure. (You can use a hose nozzle or watering wand that has a high-pressure feature to do this. On my watering wand, there is a position called 'jet' that sprays a high-pressure stream of water when the want is set to that feature.) Sometimes you have to do it once or twice a day until you've done it enough to discourage them enough that they just move on.

The honeydew from the aphids is not a problem in and off itself, but it can serve as a host for a black mold called sooty mold. It is unsightly and can cause defoliation when it is heavy, but the overall health of the tree is not harmed and new leaves will come out to replace any that fall off because of the sooty mold.

There are several ways to deal with the aphids in the future so that you don't have a recurring issue with them every year. First, you can spray your crape myrtle with dormant oil during the dormant season in order to kill overwintering aphids. Then, in spring, check the undersides of your crape myrtle leaves in spring and spray them with insecticidal soap as soon as you notice aphids. If you can nip their population in the bud early, you usually can avoid having a major infestation of them.

Having said that, since crape myrtle aphids only feed on crape myrtles, there always will be a population of them in your general area every summer, so keep checking the plants weekly and either hose off the aphids or use insecticidal soap on the undersides of the leaves. Once it is hot, though, you don't want to spray insecticidal soap on foliage because it can burn foliage of some plants in hot weather.

Another alternative would be to buy and release lady bugs at the first sign of aphids on the plants in the spring. Lady bugs are kind of random and sometimes don't show up until the aphid population is huge. Sometimes I'll see them focusing on a specific pest on a specific type of plant when I'd rather have them on some other kind of plant eating its pests, but lady bugs don't take orders from humans. They don't even take requests. By buying them and releasing them on the crape myrtles when you see the aphid population appearing, you're ensuring the lady bugs are there while the population of aphids is small and more easy to wipe out.

I am sure there are some broad-spectrum insecticides that would target the aphids, but I don't use broad-spectrum insecticides because they will kill all the beneficial insects too, so I am hoping you do not choose to spray with a broad-spectrum insecticide. About 97% of the insects we have in our yards and gardens are beneficial, and it would be a shame to kill them while trying to kill the 3% that are harmful. The aphid population will start dropping naturally in early to mid-August which is not that far away, so I'd just try to be patient and wait it out.

I'm going to link my favorite Crape Myrtle website. It has great info in its FAQ and in its section on basic Crape Myrtle care. It also features a lot of great photos. If you're a lover of Crape Myrtles and you're ever traveling down to Dallas or points southward during Crape Myrtle season, it is well worth your while to visit McKinney for an hour or two just to see the incredible array of crape myrtles grown there. Whenever we are near McKinney in crape myrtle season, I make up an excuse to get off the highway and stop there just so we can enjoy the crape myrtles that are planted simply all over the place in McKinney.

Sometimes when a plant has been topped (and this will sound drastic, but the CMs can survive it), the best way to restore its shape is to cut it back to the ground while it is dormant in winter or early spring. Then it will grow back in the shape that is natural for it. I did that with the 30-year-old crape myrtle on our property in Fort Worth because it appeared it had been topped repeatedly before we bought our house there. It regrew beautifully and the only pruning I ever had to do after that was just to remove the dead seedheads, damaged branches, branches that rubbed on one another, etc.

I agree with your father-in-law that there's not much you can do to a crape myrtle that will permanently harm it. They are incredibly resilient plants. They fall in a category of great landscape plants that won't die and that you cannot kill easily (if at all). Well, extreme and exceptional drought did kill some crape myrtles in 2011, but I assume that is because they were not watered or not watered enough.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Crape Myrtle Trails

Ok, i finally looked at a pic, i still do not recommend that you prune until early spring. I just want to say that those thick branches that got chopped back and look dead, to me at least, may be because the crape myrtle died all the way back during an exceptionally hard freeze. It has happened to me twice. The first time, i thought that both my myrtles were just goners, however i gave it a few months and they came back from the ground, so the nice thick trunks that i had worked so hard establishing and trumming up every spring had to be cut off back to the ground. Each time it froze back to the ground, i got thinner trunks that came back.

Your tree has too many trunks, you want a maximum of 5-7 if you are looking to train it up like a tree. If you want more of a shrub, then your trunks are fine.

As for the aphids, there must be something all natural you can use that wont harm the bees that are so attracted to the myrtle blossoms. Have you done a searxh on the forum? That would be a good start. Just type in crape myrtle aphid and see what you come up with.

Good luck

Emma

Hi guys,

I am so sorry I forgot to make all the pics public. They are ALL now public. I think sometimes the computer is very challenging!

thank you all for the wonderful information.

Especially the long post by okiedawn. We've not sprayed but we do have some spray in case. But next year I plan to buy lady bug nymphs. Our whole town is littered with crepes- some people have beautiful trees while most have chopped them down.

I know that they need to be reduced in trunks- but we had taken off so much of the plant, I didn't want it to die of shock so in the fall or winter, we will reduce the number of trunks- although this really scares me as we have reached the limit of our skills pruning wise. I have read several articles and am more confused than ever. I know we need to reduce the trunks, but not sure which ones- and how to make them grow as tree shape, and next year I know it will just be a battle of runners, shoots, Thankfully there is a little time to learn this a bit better. etc.

I had a landscaper come out and help me with my house before I sold it last year. There was a crepe that needed taking out. I asked him to DIG it out. He insisted all he had to do was cut it to the ground and it would never come back. Yea, right. Two days after he it it to the ground it began regenerating.

I want to thank you all for your help. If you are ever out this way, do feel free to stop by and tell me how to proceed!

Ps all 4 links should now be viewable. So sorry for not making all of them public. I thought I had done so,

Id like to reiterate not to remove any live trunks until spring.

Are the aphids wooly aphids? They draw a special type of nasty lady bug and together, the mold gets all over the place, and cannot easily be removed. We had them in trees a few years ago, and ended up removing the trees.

I think I have about 20 crape myrtles, and about 6-8 new ones that do not require much care yet.

I cut them whenever I wish. I also believe in crape murder. Nobody is concerned about cutting a topiary, but only a crape myrtle. I always cut mine down to about 4 feet, and prune all but about 6 canes. I remove the lower branches as you do. Mine are blooming now and look great.

My neighbor does not prune his crape myrtle, and it looms over his two story house. To each his own.

I like mine to be short enough that it is easy to see their blooms and the blooms of my roses.

Sammy

I have not yet seen your pics, so...no judgment there :)

A few things about crape myrtles - I agree with everything Dawn has said about the aphids - blast them off with water, etc. They are simply following the exudate from the plants - ladybugs may help with that, too.

I lived in Dallas for almost 20 years and LOVED the number of crape myrtles that could be seen throughout that city and surrounding suburbs. In my opinion you can never have enough! With that in mind, know that there are so very many varieties of them that you can generally have the color you want and the height that you want. Failure to consider the location, the maximum height, etc., is what causes many people to feel that they have to commit murder by pruning each year. This does a disservice to the plant and to the newbie gardeners that think this is what you've got to do - it's NOT. As Neil Sperry (amazing, wonderful DFW-area garden expert) says...you should routinely prune nothing larger than the size of your little finger unless it's dead wood.

Pressure off - enjoy your crapes! I've linked a Neil Sperry piece - to read the entire copy, click to the second picture :)

Sharon

Here is a link that might be useful: Crape Myrtles

Sharon,

I miss Neil Sperry! I remember back when he was the ag extension agent and wrote columns for the local newspapers when I was in either high school or college, long before he left the TAMU extension service for his career as an independent horticulturalist, book author, magazine publisher, etc. I read his magazine, his newspaper columns, listened to his radio show, attended his annual All-Garden Show in Arlington, etc.until we moved here. I still try to stay current on what he is saying via his website and newspaper columns.

Neil, by the way, is one of the main driving forces behind the Crape Myrtle Trails of McKinney and you see his words and influence on their website too.

When we first moved here, we had cotton root rot in our soil (our place was part of a cotton farm in about the 1940s or 50s, according to one local resident) something awful when we first moved here. I never would have been able to recognize it when I saw if, were it not from having heard Neil talk about it so much on his radio show. So much of what I do know about gardening was learned from him, and I still can here his voice in my head, answering whatever garden questions arise.

And, as Neil always says, one of the best times to select the varieties of crape myrtles you want to grow is in summer when they are in bloom so you can see their actual color. That's some of the best advice ever, along with his advice that you already mentioned to plant the right variety, height-wise, so you don't have to fight to keep a too-tall plant small enough to fit the space available and give you the look you want. I'm glad you mentioned his advice because he always gives such good advice, and he is just such a horticultural treasure.

Dawn

Post deleted - oops :(

This post was edited by shankins123 on Wed, Jul 24, 13 at 11:59