Thanks ken...that does look familiar....sounds like it might be maple tar spot. Thanks for the reply. Going home to rake up some leaves now :) Have a great weekend! -Chris

WORST time to plant anything...esp without shade.

I know you are talking about wind blowing over a tree so maybe someone has experience with that, but the only trees I've seen 'falling over' are the live oaks which are really leaning, in fact almost horizonal, like some live oaks grow when crowded in a group of other live oaks. When the canopy of the leaning tree becomes weighted from the rain and the ground gets soft from the same they can uproot. There's a lot of them that grow like that in my neighborhood, but only a couple have uprooted. I guess a lot depends on how deep the roots are able to go. We have very thin soil here on top of rock, so unless a tree root finds a few cracks in the rocks in which to anchor they can be shallow rooted. BTW, we've had 3 1/2 inches here since last night. I hope everyone's okay and their trees too.

Thank you so much for the informative articles. It looks dismal, not just for my own young pine forest, but for the many acres of older pine forest uphill from them, their parent trees. After mulling it over I have arrived at a philosophical outlook on the situation. When I say this is a pine forest, that is not entirely true. Both really are mixed forests with a variety of maple, hickory, apple and other species amidst the pines. So the way I look at it, while the pines are doomed, the other species will prosper and thrive and take over when their piney neighbors have been reduced to compost and relinquished their monopoly on the sunlight. We do plan to plant more spruce seedlings amidst the pines. It is good news that this rust disease does not affect spruce as well as pines, so unless the wood borer beetle that everyone is so worried about makes an appearance, the spruce trees should be able to carry on the legacy of the pines. I haven't actually planted many trees on the upper hill where most of our pines are. That area of forest pretty much seeded itself. The trees that we did plant, spruce, maple, birch, apple, are down hill from the woods in back. Again, thanks for the info. Better to plan for a pine extinction than to continue wondering.