Hooray!

[limey]

My Rose of Sharon started to bloom yesterday. That seems early to me.

Picked our very first tomatoes of the season this morning. That seems early, too, but I'm not complaining.

I'm in Maryland, zone 7.

Dora

[Vox Humana]

I noticed a few blooming here in Cincinnati today - zone 6. Mine have buds, but no color yet. The cicadas did a number on it some of the branches have broken. I'm afraid that the entire yard will be filled with grotesquely disfigured shrubs by fall.

[limey]

It's amazing what damage they can do. Here, it's strange - we moved from the previous house 17 years ago, at the height of the cicada eruptions (we lived in the woods). However, we had not even one here when we moved in here that June, even though we're surrounded by oaks.

This year again, Maryland was infested but we had none. I found that there is a small area on the Eastern Shore (where we live) which is cicada-free. I don't know why, and I don't know the boundaries, but the area certainly includes us. Strange. I hope everything recovers for you, Vox.

Dora

[Bill R]

Vox,

I am in the same area you are and I was looking around the neighborhood the other day and noticed that the female Cicadas have done a lot of damage. Here is a picture from my web site that shows the typical damage to a small shrub:

[Vox Humana]

Yep, that's what a lot of my branches look like too. For some reason I thought you were up river in the Pittsburgh area.

[Vox Humana]

I suspect that things will recover, but gardening can be a struggle. Today I noticed that my euonymus is simply covered with tiny white rods. They don't look like aphids so I will have to look into euonymus scale. I don't recall ever seeing this before. The cicadas were very localized. Some parts of town were simply covered with them. My area wasn't as bad as others and even some streets in our neighborhood were worse than others. My neighbor's crab apple tree really got hit. My maple tree that touches their tree was hardly touched. They went for my young shrubs and trees. What's got me concerned is that our area was supposed to be in the brood 8 region instead of the brood 10 region. In four years we may be hit again.