Effectively endemic on Indiana blue spruce. It is the single most common reason a blue spruce gets removed here. In Plainfield, the most age-mixed canopy of the three: a genuine 1950s ring plus the pre-1900 Quaker core along Main Street (US 40) carries 60-to-90-year-old shade trees over the street, while Saratoga, Sugar Grove Farms and Legacy Farms hold 10-to-25-year-old planted stock, and the White Lick Creek bluffs hold the town's only real remnant woodland. Ash is gone here as everywhere in Indiana. Rhizosphaera needlecast is near-universal on mature blue spruce here.
Plainfield's canopy and what's at risk
The most age-mixed canopy of the three: a genuine 1950s ring plus the pre-1900 Quaker core along Main Street (US 40) carries 60-to-90-year-old shade trees over the street, while Saratoga, Sugar Grove Farms and Legacy Farms hold 10-to-25-year-old planted stock, and the White Lick Creek bluffs hold the town's only real remnant woodland. Ash is gone here as everywhere in Indiana.
What to look for
Needles browning and dropping from the bottom of the tree upward and from the inside out, leaving bare lower limbs.
Whether the tree can be saved
Rhizosphaera needlecast is near-universal on mature blue spruce here. Fungicide can hold the line on a tree that still has most of its canopy; a spruce that's bare halfway up is not coming back, because spruce doesn't refoliate old wood.
Timing in Hendricks County
Two fungicide applications in spring, repeated for two to three consecutive years. Miss a year and it resets.
“Andy and his crew member did not disappoint. They did an exceptional job cutting down my tree and also provided additional services on another. They…”