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- The fruit on our fruit trees is swelling rapidly and some needs support pretty soon or
branches will break. Apricots, Nectarines and Peaches are particularly laden this year. Of
course you can thin the crop, but it’s hard to bring yourself to do this sometimes
and on large trees not very practical either!
- Our miniature Peach and Nectarine trees in containers have been thinned several times,
but the Nectarine branches are still sagging under the load, so I erected a small frame to
support them last weekend and settled on just 20 fruits to mature.
- Codling Moths are on the move with this warm weather. The tiny inconspicuous grey brown
moths are easily controlled using the pheromone Codling Moth Trappit™ traps. A small
rubber phial is placed onto a sticky mat in the little green tent like structure supplied
and suspended in any tree. The female moths are attracted to the male scent and get
impaled without being fertilized. End of the life cycle!
- I’m getting about six a week and I don’t even have an apple tree, but Codling
Moths also lay their eggs in the fruit of Quinces, Pears, Crabapples, Hawthorns, Walnuts
and various stonefruit all of which grow nearby in the lanes of Wayville and which I get
to eat one way or another!
- I’ve been using these Codling Moth pheromone traps for three years now and have yet
to bite into a fruit with Codling Moth larvae in this area within a radius of at least 200
metres, so I guess they are effective for that distance. They attract Codling Moths from
September to March, but do not attract any other sort of moth or butterfly.
- We get earwigs and sparrows in our silverbeet too. Annie suggested Christmas tinsel last
week to keep the sparrows away. It worked last year on the Nectarines and it seems to be
working so far on the Silverbeet too, but the earwigs are not easily controlled. That
caper of using core-flute cardboard rolled up to attract them infuriates me, as such an
ineffective ‘control’ widely advocated by gardeners who surely haven’t used
it or they have more co-operative earwigs than ours!
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