and was told by my local extension to put rocks in there to minimize water enough to keep bugs from breeding in the yuck.

==>> dont believe it ...

clean it out again & was then going to lime it followed by some spray foam insulation once I knew it was all dried out.

==>>> dont do it

all you should do.. is pay a certified arborist to examine the tree.. and decide if its a threat to you or your house.. and if so.. get rid of it ...

i had to check my calender.. because my first thought was this was an april fools joke

ken

Rocks? That's a first on this forum and in my life. Could someone even make this up?

"Could someone even make this up?"

Apparently some misguided and ill-informed extension agent did. Maybe it was some kind of misunderstanding...but I can't really imagine how.

They are trying to invent a care for the wound when no one else has one.

My first thought is the tree has to go.

First we may as well ask how large a tree is it?

How about 3 pics. The wound, the seepage and the whole thing.

It sounds bad but if this tree is out in the middle of a wide open space and isn't going to grow over anything perhaps nature can take its course.

If it is in front of your house, get rid of it now, before it decides to lose a section on your house or a neighbor's house. If you want to let it die a natural death, it is probably on it's way and you will have parts of tree raining down on you at inconvenient moments. :) And regarding the stench. Ummm.. If it is a big enough cavity, some poor creature might have crawled in and not out. Just a thought.

Edit: Just read a slime flux description and if that is the smell and the source - The stuff running out is a bacterial soup of stuff that is very very nasty. Don't play with it or get it in any open cut, wound, etc. You do not want to deal with an infection from pretty much any of the soup ingredients.

I wonder if we could have a picture of this cavity? The op's description of a cavity where 3 branches meet could be a natural crotch catching rain water and breeding mosquitoes. We don't really know for sure what the 'bugs' or 'yuck' are. And even if it is slime flux it seems doubtful it could kill pants beneath the tree.

Apparenlty the freind that told me to get decent advice here was wrong.

Sorry that a person with level one or maybe level two tree knowledge even asked how to solve the problem for under 10k. I don't need to be getting nasty mean spirited messages for asking a question and I don't need to get blasted or accused of being a liar for someone at the extension office telling me what was apparently a bad idea. Wow, what a freindly place.

I'm not sure if your reply was intended for me, Salomea. If it was I'm sorry you have taken my message the wrong way. If you could post a picture of the problem we can understand the situation better and help more meaningfully based on a better understanding of the facts.

Salomea, I can't figure out what you are talking about. No one accused you of lying. The only place I can see that you might have even thought that is where Ken advised you not to believe what you said the extension agent told you. Maybe (and that's a big maybe), you read it as if Ken was saying he didn't believe you. I am sure that's not what he was saying. Other than that, I'm baffled.

I'm also confused about why you think that people taking their time to give advise that you asked for are being mean spirited. I don't see any examples of mean-spiritedness in this thread.

I have, on occasion, seen things get out of hand on GardenWeb, but in general this is indeed a fairly friendly place. Sometimes we are passionate about our ideas, but we usually manage to discuss them in a pretty helpful way.

If we are going for the guilt, maybe what I wrote "could someone even make this up" could have been the offensive remark? Perhaps our collective disbelief, expressed in a variety of ways, sounded like scorn to a new poster. Not the first time that's happened.

Salomea, if you added the collective gardening years here, it would be in the hundreds. We think we've heard it all, but once in a while a new theory (rocks in cavities) just knocks off our sox.

We forget what a risk it can feel like to ask a question on a public forum. I remember my feelings being hurt,too. Come back and ask more questions. We're friendly even if we sometimes laugh too loud at the wrong places.

I thought we sounded a bit rough on the OP as well. It is difficult to relay emotions on line. It is even more difficult when typing in the limited slow keyboards of tablets and phones to give a proper response.

Please OP, nobody here was accusing you of anything, I promise! Just exclaiming in horror at what extension offices (who are supposed to be staffed by at least one or two experts) will suggest.

I have actually heard of the using the expandable foam to fill cavities and many people do it, but it usually isn't good for the tree in the long run, and if the tree has something else going on, it can make it worse.

When I first started visiting GW, it took me a post or 4 to realize that most things should be read with a friendly tone and a smile, because that is how it is intended!

Ken has no malice toward anyone or anything, except trees and shrubs growing in the wrong place. ;o) I'll pick on him because we are from the same area, have the same background and are probably distant cousins twice removed... Mr. Cut it down!! Dig it out! but really just practical advice, from a heart of gold.