Well, I wanted to give an update on how my elm is doing.
About 10 days ago I started acclimitating it to outdoors and aerated the soil with a chopstick down to the bottom every square inch. It's been in a partially shaded exposure underneath a Japanese Maple in our garden for this time and over the last 5 days its been spending night and day there. We've had a bit of rain and coolish weather lately so I've not watered for about 8 days and the soil still feels damp up top. It's also not been fertilized in about 12 days.
This morning I pruned off quite a large amount of dead withered foliage. I subjectively feel it is doing better...previously when it was inside I was seeing quite a bit of new shoots sprouting....long tendril like shoots which gave an impression of vigour but while this was going on most of the medium maturity foliage seemed to wither and die. This morning during my pruning session I saw lots of shoots which appear to have turned brown and become constricted at their distal tips, narrowing down from the tip towards the main branch and eventually turning black and dead. I've tried to show some of that with the third picture below, but most of the dead or dying foliage has been trimmed off now, so you need to look closely to see what I'm talking about.
One other thing I noted as I did my pruning was there definitely are a number of spider webs and filaments in the tree, with one pretty impressive cluster on the apical set of branches. Too hard to take photos, but definitely there. I also saw a spider climbing onto a leaf and had a good look at him after I took him off. Very tiny....probably about 1 mm long with a head segment and a bum segment visible. Kind of tough to call the colour but I'd say light brown...perhaps a suggestion of rust or redness mixed in. His bum segment was around 3 times larger than his head segment. That's really all I can say about the spider and I am not sure if a spider infestation is an important factor in my tree right now or not.
Attaching these photos and happy for more advice. I've tried to give a couple of closeups of the soil as there has been discussion about whether I should repot or not.
My questions are:
1. Do people think I should repot?
2. Do people think I should treat for spider and if so which kind of spider and with what?
3. How often should I be fertilizing over the coming 3 months?
4. Should I continue in the "dappled sunlight" location under my maple tree or should I move the tree into a location to give it more light. Most light I can get in our garden would be about 4 hours of direct sunlight a day.
Hope the photos help and thanks for comments on above everyone,
Dave
