Plant Health Care & Tree Spraying

In recent years, Long Island has faced numerous severe weather events, including super storms, extreme temperatures, droughts, and heavy snow.

The impact on your landscape can be significant, and damage may not be visible for years. LaMay’s Tree Service recommends a thorough plant health care consultation to assess your needs and develop a personalized program.

Our Plant Health Care Division is at the forefront of tree and shrub care excellence.

Our expert staff specializes in plant and insect identification and diagnosing various disease issues, as proper identification is essential for maintaining a healthy landscape.

Our trained technicians excel at detecting even the smallest problems, enabling us to address them proactively.

Collaborating closely with you, our PHC team will develop a comprehensive program tailored to your property, incorporating Integrated Pest Management, disease monitoring, tick control, and bio-organic treatments.

We will also assess your fertilization needs to enhance the vitality of your landscape.

Beech Leaf Disease (BLD) is a fatal tree disease that primarily attacks American Beech Trees. This is a relatively new disease and has only affected us on long Island in the last few years. We are still learning about the disease but Arborists have now identified a specific nematode as the cause. The parasitic nematode sucks nutrients from beech leaves to survive and reproduce.

Although we are still learning about this disease and its causes, homeowners need to know the signs and what to do when it manifests in their trees. Luckily, BLD has noticeable signs and symptoms indicating an infection. The lateral veins of beech leaves will have dark stripes or bands between them (these can be more easily seen by standing beneath the tree and looking up at the leaves on a sunny day). As the disease progresses, new symptoms appear, such as smaller leaves, leathery texture on leaves, heavier and more noticeable banding, crinkled, deformed or shriveled leaves. The nematodes do most of their damage to leaves in summer and late fall. As it gets later in fall, the nematodes exit the leaves and migrate to buds, where they overwinter and lay eggs for the next season.

Cottony Maple Scale is one of the largest and most conspicuous of the scale insects and a common problem on Long Island. Heavy populations cause the dieback of twigs and branches and premature foliage loss. This scale feeds on the sap of Maple, Oak, Dogwood, Beech, Euonymus, Sycamore, Willow, Linden, Elm, Fruit trees, Rose, Lilac, Virginia Creeper and others.

Cottony Maple Scale overwinters on twigs as an immature flat female that grows rapidly in spring. Before the leaves begin dropping in the fall, the females migrate back to the twigs and attach them-selves for overwintering. One generation is produced a year.

Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, o, is an invasive, aphid-like insect that attacks North American Hemlocks. They are very small and hard to see, but they can be easily identified by the white woolly masses they form on the underside of branches at the base of the needles. All species of hemlock are vulnerable to attack, but severe damage and death typically occurs in eastern (Tsuga canadensis) and Carolina (Tsuga Caroliniana) Hemlocks only.

Juveniles, known as crawlers, can usually be found at the base of the needles. They insert their long mouthparts and begin feeding on the tree’s stored starches. They will remain in the same spot for the rest of their lives, continually feeding and developing into adults. Their feeding severely damages the canopy of the host tree by disrupting the flow of nutrients to its twigs and needles. Tree health declines, and mortality usually occurs within 4 to 10 years.