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Ask Burton: This week, we’re talking about one of our favorite types of plant problems – the types where doing nothing is the best answer. Q: My oak trees (live oaks mostly) are having a lot of browning on their leaves! Random splotches, twisted leaves, and now, many are falling off the tree and littering the ground. What should I do to address this?

Posted on May, 04

A: I’ve had over a hundred cases of this problem brought to me over the past three weeks. This is oak leaf blister, a disease brought on by the numerous rains in the earlier part of the season, when the tree’s new growth was first coming out for the year. It will cause leaves to pucker, twist, and fall.

There’s nothing at all you can do about it by the time you see it, but there is good news. As plant diseases go, this one is pretty minor. It causes some defoliation, which the tree will regrow without you doing a thing. The disease stops spreading as soon as the leaves get a little more mature, and we start having drier and sunnier weather.

In a normal year, you might see a little bit of this and never notice. It’s just a bit worse than usual this year – DFW Airport had measurable rainfall fifteen days straight this year, and so this disease was a lot more prevalent than normal. But relax. Nothing beyond the normal feeding of your trees needs to be done to fix this problem.