The Barrier Method – Or Getting Ready for a Night Out on the Town

Not what you thought, huh?

Whenever someone asks why we have pantyhose on our apples and pears Tom responds with “They’re getting ready for a night out on the town.” Yes, it looks a bit odd to have pantyhose covered fruit hanging off of a tree, but I’m telling you it really helps keep the OMG-I-just-bit-a-worm-in-half-while-biting-into-this-apple-surprises to a minimum.

Oh the codling moth. We don’t have a problem with them yet, but I don’t want to encourage them so I’m proactive with keeping them out of our fruit trees. Bagging them is the most effective organic control for codling moth and doesn’t need any additional controls.

Unfortunately it’s really time consuming so it’s really only useful for backyard growers with small trees. I spent 2 hours and I only got about 2/3s of the tree done. I’ve actually been dreading doing this so I’ve procrastinated. Hopefully I didn’t wait too long. You’re supposed to bag them when the fruit is only about a 1/2″ in diameter. As you can see from these fruitlets, they are much larger than that. The one thing that is on my side though is this weather. It hasn’t gotten warm yet and they don’t start getting active until the sunset temperature reaches the mid ’60s.

We used these nylon covers last year with good success. Unfortunately they don’t stop the squirrels from taking chomps out of the apples.