All-natural fruit tree “bait” jugs for insects: they work!
such tender and beautiful buds!
This post was updated just for you, Gentle, fruit-growing Reader, in August 2019. Treat your fruit trees to all-natural bait jugs that will attract (and drown) problematic insects.
The Delight of your own orchard
We planted a small orchard on our place about ten years ago and were delighted when it started to produce fruit a few years ago. Being able to walk out to your own orchard and harvest delicious fruit is an experience everybody ought to have! Even one or two trees can be planted on a small city plot. But we learned that we needed to do something to catch the multitudes of pests that came after our fruit.
The Dismay of wormy fruit
Our delight quickly turned to dismay, however, when we discovered that much of our lovely fruit was wormy! Most of the damage, we learned, was the work of the common and infamous codling moth, admittedly a rather attractive moth but not one that you want to hang around your fruit trees.
Or befoul and completely ruin your hard-won orchard fruit.
This is what we want to avoid!
Here it is: the infamous Cydia pomonella.
A plethora of pests
There are a large number of pests–crawling, burrowing, wandering, and flying ones–that will harbor ruinous thoughts toward your efforts to grow beautiful fruit. Deer will wander in at night and eat the bark off the trees, harming and even killing young trees; rabbits and voles will burrow underneath and dine on roots; and then there are the insects. There are so many, but I’m going to be addressing making all-natural bait jugs to hang in your fruit trees today for the one that does the most damage to my fruit.
It’s the dreaded cydia pomonella, or the cunning, greedy codling moth.
The codling moth (cydia pomonella) is a pest that is common all over the world, though it was native to Europe originally. The larva of the moth is the common apple worm or maggot. The little bugger will also attack pears, walnuts, and other tree fruits.
Question: But why don’t you just spray–?
Spraying fruit trees with a chemical spray several times throughout the growing season is generally believed to be the only way to repel the insects that do the most damage to the fruit in our area. I actually bought some spray a few years ago. I was so determined to have bug-free fruit.
Reading the warnings on the back of the bottle scared me away from using it, though.
“HAZARDS TO HUMANS AND DOMESTIC ANIMALS! Causes substantial but temporary eye injury. Causes skin irritation. Harmful if inhaled or swallowed. Do not get in eyes, on skin or on clothing. . . BEE CAUTION: MAY KILL HONEYBEES OR OTHER BEES. This product is very toxic to honeybees!”
Yikes! That’s not all. The warnings go on at some length, but that was enough for me to put the bottle of spray aside and think hard about whether I wanted to risk it or not. I never did pick it up again. (I love our honeybees and song birds!)
This is what you want! Beautiful, insect-damage-free fruit!
Healthy honeybees and songbirds
We spend quite a bit of time and energy trying to keep our honeybees healthy and to attract songbirds to our place: I wouldn’t want to do anything that would harm them or drive them away. And of course my spoiled chickens have the run of our place most of the time, as well.
I have oodles of good reasons to avoid using chemical insect controls on our place. Oodles!!
However, it’s not much fun to eat wormy fruit. Happily–amazingly–a couple of years ago, I discovered a natural way to keep the nasty bugs away from my fruit. This method is very easy to do, and uses supplies that you probably have in your kitchen right now.
It’s very simple; it doesn’t cost much; it won’t hurt your songbirds, your children, your dog or your honeybees; and it has been very effective in my own orchard, even last year which was unusually hot, dry and buggy.
If you have fruit trees and are put off by the chemical spray route, and if the codling moth or other insects have made your fruit nearly impossible to enjoy, you may want to try this also.
The answer to the problem: all-natural bait jugs for insects
Here are the things you’ll need, for each tree you have, and if your trees are quite large you might want to double up.
- Gallon-size plastic jug (milk jugs are good, vinegar jugs–which are tougher–are even better. 2-liter pop bottles are tough and can be used too, but they don’t have that handy handle)
- Sturdy twine or rope
- a sharp knife or sturdy pair of scissors
- 1 cup white vinegar
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup water
- 2 banana peels, cut in strips (I’ve substituted other fruit peels when we didn’t have bananas in the house, and they seemed to work just as well)
And here’s how you make your all-natural bait jugs to catch those insects:
- Slice off a third of the top of the gallon jug (leave the handle intact) and punch a few holes along the top edge. Thread a 2′(ish) length of twine through handle and holes.
- Mix together the sugar and vinegar, and put into the jug. Add the banana strips.
- Add the water to the solution and stir vigorously.
- Hang the jug in your fruit tree.
- Check the jug every day or two for moths, and replace with new solution when necessary. If you have codling moths in your area (and you probably do) when they are most active your solution will be positively full of dead moths on a daily basis. It’s pretty thrilling, really. If the jugs fill up with moths too quickly, I’ll double the recipe so I don’t have to change the solution so often. I have other things going on too, after all. 🙂
You must get the timing right
Three years ago when I hung these jugs in my orchard for the first time, I must have hit the timing just right, because the next day when I went out to check on the jugs, every single one was so full of dead moths that I couldn’t even see the solution. I delightedly dumped them all into the compost pile and refilled them with new solution. I had to do this a few times during the first week or two, but my apples that year were nearly free of moth damage and worms.
It took just a little bit of time and attention, but the rewards were huge!
The gallon jugs don’t show up that much, nestled into the fruit trees like this. Look at all the pretty blossoms on this apple tree! Hooray!
Having all those lovely apples was even more thrilling than finding all the dead moths in the traps!
How lucky we are that the Cydia Pomonella doesn’t know the back stroke.
When to hang the jugs is very important!
If you want to try this for yourself, it’s important to get those jugs full of solution into your fruit trees before they bloom, or at least as the blooms are opening, as that’s when the codling moth seems to begin laying eggs. What happens is that the moth is attracted to the vinegar-sugar solution with the fruit peels, and then drowns in it, thus not laying its eggs on the leaves and blossoms of the fruit tree.
A Book you must have:
By the way. I just bought this book and am currently–wide-eyed–working my way through it. I highly, highly recommend it to you if you are growing an orchard and care about doing it right. It’s an awesome book.
We installed the jugs in our orchard trees this week, and I’m checking them every day or two for moths. My trees are blossoming beautifully this spring, so I’m looking forward to lots of delicious, chemical-free fruit this summer!
So now, Gentle Reader, if you have fruit trees and have been perplexed by the damage of coddling moths or other baffling insects in the past . . . well. . . . now you know what to do!
Pin it for later
And if you’d do me and your friends the favor of sharing this post with them, we’d all be in debt to you–because–who doesn’t want better fruit from their fruit trees? (And thank you!)
*hugs*