I don't know why I'm having such difficulty with these lovely plants. Every time I turn around I have new battle to deal with. This is showing up on both of my one-year-old kratoms I just planted. I'm hitting them with neem oil but it doesn't seem to be having an effect on it. Suggestions.
I can't get a good close up view of this, but it almost looks like a coffee leaf fungus. Kratom is, after all, in the family Rubiaceae, as is coffee. These fungi are often worse on lower leaves that are damper and older, and not so much on the upper youngest and driest/aerated leaves. Coffee rust perhaps, if its fluffy, like rust. Maybe coffee blight spot, if it's not raised/not fluffy in appearance. I wish I had a leaf to put under my microscope though. That could rule out mites or other sap sucking bugs making those spots.
Is it affecting all leaves or just some older ones? How suddenly did this happen to the leaves? I'd this affecting just one or more trees? Did this show up after they were transplanted? If so, how did it's environment change from before to after the move?
Maybe a call to your local state university AG center or a detailed email with a few pix? They've helped me with truly bizarre pathogen problems, some of which were really nutritional deficiencies in disguise.
If in doubt, I'd remove affected leaves, water and feed only at the soil level, and use a dilute copper based fungicide in the early morning (to permit it to dry out by evening). This is $10 well spent, since it can also prophylactically treat rooting media for some rot/damping off disease pathogens too! .........
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Bonid...
I'm sorry that I can't be of more help at the moment. I know how helpless you can feel when one of your 'kids' is sick More details might help.... (?)
I do wish you best luck and ultimately, success.
Assuming that you're keeping them well nourished, and avoiding water on the leaves (esp. at night), maybe a copper based fungicide might be indicated. Perhaps a dusting of agricultural sulfur might do. (As a pyrotechnician, I love sulfur for animal and plant diseases)
Maybe a brief history and some details about the plant and it's environment might help us to narrow this down.
honestly, this looks a little bit like my trees did when i used neem too much/too concentrated. I suspect the red dots are burns around stomata. Try giving them a break with watering as needed. Not sure the burns will recover, but it should keep growing.
I never used neem on them until this event occurred.
I also noticed it's on the stems of the new growth as well, not any of the Woody Parts but the fresher stems. I should add that the spots are on the sunny side of the stem not the underside
i've seen spotting like this when putting trees into full sun light. Always thought it was a sort of sun burn. The spots appear to be red little dots and appear on only the leaf.
Haven't seen spots other than white on stems before though. Usually the stems will just turn bright red or pink with no regard to their parents strains vein colour but that's a summer thing. I'm not seeing any of that now.
Zoom in on the picture and you'll see. I feel doomed nothing I've tried has any effect on this shit whatsoever short of a full-blown fungicide treatment. Which I've really tried to avoid because it'll contaminate the crap out of the leaf. I've been Relentless with the neem oil spraying underneath the leaf and on top as I did this morning after we had a rain last night. I tried a mild copper soap fungicide with no effect on the stuff. I tried baking soda and soap solution no effect. I'm currently testing a cinnamon Solution on one of the branches so far not seeing an effect. I'm going to try an alcohol solution next. I encourage you to check your plant frequently I can't be the only one on the planet that gets this. Once it starts it takes over it's on all of my kratom. Except some young bumblebee I have in the backyard although I found a couple spots on it this morning and scrape them off. They say to remove the infected leaves if I did that I'd have a stick.
Edit: started to wonder Could the plant have a potential deficiency making it susceptible to this? If so what might be the deficiency any ideas?
@roadkill. The more that I examine this photo, the more that I am thinking that you might be right about a deficiency of some type. When you said that you were scrubbing some spots off though, I wasn't so sure. Deficiency (or salt poisoning) spots can't be scrubbed off.
Could it be too much of a fertilizer combined with a change of watering, that allowed to much or to little of something, so that the sun could cause rapid transpirational losses, which could concentrate nutrients (or fertilizer salts), into the leaves?
These two trees were moved, right? Do any others have these spots, that didn't get moved?
Kratom seem to be very resilient, and I'd expect that they will likely fully recover, maybe after dropping a leaf or three.
I have fig trees that drop leaves after the annual rust fungus ravages their leaves. For the past 7 years it always comes back stronger and bigger than ever. life is tough and Kratom seems resolute in it's will to thrive.
There are many trace nutrient adjuvants at the big hardware stores. I've used the Pennington brand, shown in one of my posts, as well as volcanic ash/green sand as a top dressing, for trace minerals. I don't know if this helps with the analytical process here to determine what is going on with them. Keep the community posted, and best success to you. Go Kratom!
Edit: btw, since you have st least two plants, you can try prospective remedies on one and use the other as a 'control', to evaluate the effectiveness of your 'cures'. Good luck, and success to you and your babies. 🎄
@roadkill have you looked into brewing a compost tea? The microbs produced in it might help fight the fungus.
@peteypyro when I said scrape I miss wrote that because when I scrape I actually make a hole in the leaf. The fungus or whatever it is goes all the way through to the other side.
@Frankp4998 I read up on the compost tea and it sounds very interesting and it's something I will definitely look into and try
