Acacia disease?

Hello everyone,



At the nursery down the road from me they've got a couple of "Sweet Acacias." The tags do not give any other sort of name, so that's all I've got to go off of. I'm interested in their tiny leaves and apparent somewhat fast growth. However, the trees appear to have some sort of disease or something. On the branches and some of the leaves there is a sort of brown looking mess. It comes off easily and does not appear to be any kind of scale. A look under the microscope also confirms it isn't bug like. Is this brown looking stuff normal on Acacias? If not, any clues as to what it may be?

The pictures aren't the best, I apologize:

No idea what that is but here are some shots of mine. No trace of that brown stuff.








BTW if you are in the East you are most likely looking at 'A. farnesiana' if you were out here near Vegas or the Desert Southwest I would say 'A. smallii' some will tell you they are the same however other authorities note that smallii is more cold tolerant. (to the high 30's)

Thanks Clyde. I did some googling and it would appear that is is Vachellia farnesiana. I also managed to find your post on BNut about the one you own. That one has a huge trunk, whereas these have tiny little stick trunks. That, along with the weird brown gunk, will probably make me hold off on purchasing one of these until I can find one with a decent trunk. I seem to now be getting mixed results on the growth rate of these. Hmmm.

As far as growth rate they are... well unbelievably fast. If I would not have chopped mine three times last year it would be 6+ feet.

milehigh_7 wrote:As far as growth rate they are... well unbelievably fast. If I would not have chopped mine three times last year it would be 6+ feet.

I assume yours is outdoors year round though, right? Indoors under lights I imagine they'd be pretty slow to thicken trunkwise.

It was a pretty nice score. At its widest it is about 3.5". I did a massive root reduction to get it from the 10 gal can it came in. I took my sawzall and removed roughly 3/4 of the root mass and I dropped it in this strainer from the .99 cent only store. I thought I lost it this winter on a freak drop into the 20's. Being the tough bugger it is you can see it growing strongly. I am going to shoot for a "Pierneef" style.

milehigh_7 wrote:It was a pretty nice score. At its widest it is about 3.5". I did a massive root reduction to get it from the 10 gal can it came in. I took my sawzall and removed roughly 3/4 of the root mass and I dropped it in this strainer from the .99 cent only store. I thought I lost it this winter on a freak drop into the 20's. Being the tough bugger it is you can see it growing strongly. I am going to shoot for a "Pierneef" style.

Nice little tree. It appears that it only backbudded around the chop site, is that true or did you just remove all the other lower growth?

It throws buds everywhere. You pretty much can't stop them once established. Mine is in full, hot Las Vegas sun very fast draining soil so lots of water and fert every week.

Yeah I'm afraid that being indoors may slow the growth, so maybe I'll just keep searching until I find one with a decent trunk.

Still wonder what this stuff is though