Ways to beat the pests, preserve your fruit

Are you hungry enough to beat the pests to your fruit?

Each season, we dream of luscious apples without worm holes, cherries that never have maggots and peach trees that are not dying from borer damage.

Unfortunately, beating the pests is not easy.

Fruit trees are long-term perennial crops. That removes one very important pest control option of crop rotation. You are committed to growing the same plant in the same place for many years.

To put it into simple terms, the pests find your trees and they start eating them.

You cannot change crops nor can you move the plants around. You generally cannot cover them with nets or screens to keep out the pests.

The plants are large, so spraying them is often difficult.

Let's face it. Fruit is often one of the more difficult plants on which to control pests.

The first thing to do is to determine what the pest is going to do. Some pests destroy the fruit so, if your tree has no fruit because it is young or the fruit froze, you may not need to control those pests.

Other pests can kill the trees, so you need to prevent them from damaging your trees each year.

Wormy apples are always a problem. The culprit is the codling moth that attacks apples and pears throughout the world. The moth lays its eggs on the skin of the apple, and when the egg hatches, it burrows into the fruit and feeds there.

Eventually, the worm matures, burrows out of the apple, pupates and turns into another adult moth, which starts the process over again.

To control the insect, you have to prevent the worm from entering the fruit. One strategy is to bag the fruit so the worms cannot get to it.

Unsprayed apples usually have 90 percent chance of producing wormy fruit.

Another approach is to cover the fruit with a barrier or desiccant to keep the eggs from hatching or to destroy the larvae. One such strategy is to cover the fruit with a kaolin clay spray.

Conventional controls require spraying the fruit before the moths lay their eggs. The eggs hatch, the tiny worms contact the insecticide and then they die before entering the fruit. That requires precise spray timing and good coverage to control this pest.