Diagnose & Treat Boxwood Root Rot: Your Essential Guide

Sherri Harrah:

Hi, I’m Sherri Harrah with HomeShow Garden Pros. And I want to talk about boxwoods today. Boxwoods in the Gulf Coast region are being devastated by a disease that attacks the root system. It’s a boxwood root rot and it’s in a classification of water molds. Which are really fun to deal with, especially when we get heavy, heavy rainfalls. They move through the soils and attack the host. Boxwoods happen to be one of their most favorite things to attack, but they’ll also get things like your azaleas, your photinias, sometimes even Knock-Out roses. So if you’re seeing this kind of browning branch by branch by branch, then you have the root rot. So we want to address this in a very different fashion than other funguses that we would treat with chemicals. We want to do this with like a probiotic effect.

So first we would go in and cut back past where the damage is. So you’re going to remove the damage so that we can monitor and see if it’s continuing to spread after treatment. Now, treating this, like I said, it’s more of a probiotic effect. MicroLife has this liquid AF and it is loaded with beneficial microorganisms that are going to colonize that root system to eat the bad fungus. So like when you take a probiotic to feed your gut, it’s doing the same thing in your soil. So what you would do is you would use these two products. This is the MicroLife AF and this is the MicroLife Soil and Plant Energy, which is a humic acid molasses blend that’s going to feed all the little good guys that you’re putting out in the MicroLife AF.

So you would do two ounces of the MicroLife AF in your gallon of water. So we’ll mix two ounces. And then two ounces of your Soil and Plant Energy. And I use this on a lot of my soil areas where plants are struggling because it really stimulates the biology. Okay, so you would just mix that in there, give it a little shake, and then you would pour this down around the root system because that’s where the pathogen is active. So you’ll do this about every two to three weeks, so every seven to 14 days. You could go three weeks if you’re a little bit busier. But you would just pour it in, let it go all the way through, penetrate the soil. Pretend these are planted in a flower bed so you’re not going to see the water come out of the bottom.

But just do it a few times so it penetrates and gets all around that root system. And then, like I said, every seven to 14 days, two to three weeks or so, hit it again until we don’t see a reoccurrence of the disease. Then after that, it’s just maintenance mode. Once you don’t see the reoccurrence and the browning continuing, whether it’s this, the Knock-Out roses, your azaleas, whatever you were seeing the damage on, when you don’t see a reoccurrence, then you can back off and you can just maintain it by adding good organic fertilizer occasionally, good mulching and compost practices as well. So I hope this helps so you can have beautiful boxwood hedges.