hey welcome to GW .... first.. see link next.. is your product labeled for monthly use?? and that aside.. the mature ones are impervious to any treatment with their waxy coating.. and you must ID when the babes crawl out and are susceptible to the oil ... and that is once a year .. not monthly ... you are wasting product/money.. if nothing else ... third.. ants are usually around.. to 'milk' honeydew from whatever it is ... they are irrelevant to it all ... and the black is usually a mold as a result of the honeydew ... in other words.. get rid of the scale.. the ants will move on.. and sooner or later the mildew will go away ... the real problem.. is that the mature ones.. look no different if they are dead or alive.. just because you kill them.. doesnt mean they are going to disappear ... and frankly.. when it comes to this point.. i usually have a hard time 'looking' at them for years to come ... and it is then i think about cutting them down ... now i know nothing about this plant.. as i didnt even know it existed before your post ... but if it is like many hedges or flowering shrubs.. there is probably no reason you couldnt cut them to near ground level.. remove EVERYTHING.. treat the stumps for remnants of scale ... and within a few months.. just about have your hedge back .. since there is no insult to the root mass ... and in the meanwhile.. have removed 99.99% of the problem ... [i would burn it.. and find some satisfaction in sending them to the Elysian fields ...funeral pyre and all that ..]... hopefully you can find out if rejuvenation pruning' is an option with this plant .. good luck ken Here is a link that might be useful: link

That's a mass of fruit. You can only link to one photo for your post. However you can post multiple pictures within the body of the text, but you need to have them on a web-site, like in an album with Photobucket.

Lilly pillies are great plants for a kid safe garden. Some varieties don't taste as nice but none are poisonous and as kearnage says they make great jams and jellies. My only problem with letting young kids eat berries of trees, etc is they may eat berries of poisonous plants as they are too young to tell the difference. I've had 5 kids, oldest 22 and youngest nearly 5, and have never had a problem with them eating the wrong thing and I have never restricted the plants in the garden. Supervision and teaching them from an early age about eating berries - what is 'yukky' or 'bitey' and get them to show you the berries first before eating.

Thought I would add our experience. In the week after Xmas 2010 ( temperatures in high 30s for the whole week) we decided to try and transplant 8 lilly pilly trees with trunks approx. 8 - 10cm thick, which had been kept pruned to about 2 metres in height and not sure of age. We didnt care if we ended up buying new plants but thought we would give it a go. We haphazardly pruned the trees back hard( one ended up with no leaves at all). We use a pick axe to dig a circle ( trench) out about 30cm all round from each trunk, soaked the soil with water and then used a pruning hack saw, pushing it down into the trench where ever we felt there was a thick root still holding on, then rocked tree back and forward until all roots snapped. The roots ended up shredded and totally bare of soil. The area we were moving them to was very dry with clay about 15cm down. We roughly broke up the clay in a circle just larger than the roots and added the only soil we had which was a sandy loam and some wetting crystals. We then stood the lilly pilly roots ontop of this and then mounded more sandy loam over the roots where ever they lay. We knew this would dry out too quickly so we used broken bark pieces (unused from wood pile) and piled this all over the sandy loam mound ( theory was to try and shade the sandy stuff). We installed a drip water system with a drip at base of each trunk ( We flatten the mound around the base of the trunk and pulled back the bark so water wouldnt just run straight off top of bark and down sides of mound). We watered the trees whenever we watered the vegies and every second day I sprayed the outside of the bark mounds ( theory - to keep them moist? ). We transplaned two murrayas ( spelling ?) at the same time in the same way. We decided to keep treating them like live plants until THEY showed us they were dead. Now... 1 month later, with more temps of over mid thirties ( even 40s) ALL of the plants have began showing new shoots up the branches with two even beginning to fruit again. The Murrayas showed new shoots within the first two weeks even though they were taken out last when we were totally fed up with trying to be NICE to the plants. As you can see... We didnt know what we were doing.. had no advice... and were not gentle. These trees just seem to live on and on. to anyone thinking about transplanting lilly pillies.. give it a go,.. you have nothing to lose.