Jayco: Cedar apple rust is a disease that is active very early in spring, mostly April and in colder areas may up to mid-May. If your CAR problems amount to only a few spots on the leaves, and the disease has not caused serious problems on the fruit of your bearing Macs, you have relatively mild cases. But a serious CAR outbreak on the fruit distorts and ruins the apples, often leaving them to rot right on the trees. If you ever see a greasy yellow/orange substance on the calyx ends of the fruit, you may want to consider preventive measures, which must be taken early. All spraying is temporary. I sure wish it was permanent. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Kathi: Continue to water, control weeds, and apply a good organic mulch if you haven't already. Probably it will take off next yr. If it lags next yr, apply a little nitrogen fertilizer. Nothing much else is likely to be needed. The Fruitnut

Those are some good ideas MileHighGirl. In particular, putting the bait under the cage makes a lot of sense, as the animal will need to work to get at it, increasing the chances of tripping the trap. It's also important to secure the trap (a rock on each side), as I've seen the trap moved to get at bait which fell through. Fred, my area is a bit too urban for guns. Besides, I'm a bad enough shot I would probably hurt my trees, house or neighbors more than the target. When I was a kid, around 8 years old, I was growing corn (rather poorly) in my parent's garden. A neighborhood kid (who I was not friendly with) helped himself and I chased him down, almost getting him with a rock. I missed him, but got his father's car windshield...Hmm...Maybe that's not a great story to drive home the point "look what can happen when you don't hit what you aim at." I finally managed to catch the ground hog. Wrapping the cage in the small tarp seems to have made the difference. Though I also used a larger chunk of apple core to make it tougher for small animals to carry away (per Cindy's suggestion), which probably helped. I may not need the cantaloupe I just bought- I got home with it to find the groundhog caught. **Knocks on wood that there aren't any more ground hogs around**

if that is the whole tree.. it is dead ... if its only one branch ... the branch is dead.. and we would need to see the rest of the tree ... and if you want us to speculate why it died... we need pix of the whole .... and any additional facts that might help.. e.g. its a recent transplant ... [of which i expect dan's default #1] ken