SAGiles-writing about life!

They really are nasty and eat away at the leaves and branches. Our trees are over twenty years old, and so I didn't want to take the chance of a disease starting to do them permanent damage. They crawl through the grass, and I don't know what kind of damage they can do to the grass, and we even found them crawling up an outside wall of the house. YUK! I hope my neighbors appreciate the fact we did our utmost to protect their trees. And since we live close to a very large and lovely city park--we helped to protect those trees as well!

As a kid we use to burn them out of my grandparent's trees. The webs are very flamable and the tree will not catch on fire. We would have a running water hose close by just in case. It would rid the trees of the little pests in practically just minutes. If any returned, we would just burn out the ones that came back. It saved the trees and we never burned anything down doing it. This old trick was carried down to us by a great uncle. Of course I can understand the objections that this would raise and the political incorrectness about it. It is probably better to use chemicals that will eventually wind up in our drinking water. That is a more accepted practice and more politically correct. Just sharing what I have seen work and work well it did.