Image by Pesticides might ensure you get a fuller crop in your backyard, but really, can't the average homeowner live with losing a small percentage of fruit to insects if it means healthier fruit and a better environment?
Pesticides might ensure you get a fuller crop in your backyard, but really, can't the average homeowner live with losing a small percentage of fruit to insects if it means healthier fruit and a better environment?
Our apple tree on The Homestead recieves no petsticides and we have the best apple pies...Yummy!
in August
So what are the best ways to grow fruit without using pesticides?
Please comment and help other interested people!
in August
The best way is to grow more plants than you could need, so the bugs and birds can have some, and you still get some. In time, natural predators will help you control your pests.
in August
I don't use any chemicals on my blueberries, strawberries, or raspberries. They aren't trees but I don't have room for trees where I live now. I can guarantee that when I do have fruit trees I will never apply poison to them or any other food I grow.
I agree with Bridget, plant extra. Also, enhance the biodiversity of your garden to insure predator species, plant sacrificial plants, plant varieties that are well adapted to the climate you live in, keep them healthy with good soil building, plant small areas of one species intermingled with other beneficial plants, avoid monoculture.
in September
Here's a tip for keeping codling moth (and similar) out of fruit trees:
in late summer, tie wide strips of corrugated cardboard around the trunk of the tree. the larval stage of the moth will (instead of climbing up the tree) settle in to the nice cosy cardboard and call it home. early to mid spring, before they re-activate, take the cardboard off and burn it. a year or two at most, no more codling moth. (and you recycle a bit of cardboard too!)
this month
