Preparedness

Last year, a lot of my apple crop and some of my pear crop were infested with codling moth larvae. Given that I don’t spray my trees, I needed to come up with an alternative for control, unless I wanted to grow apples for the moths. This season, I’ve sprayed kaolin clay, which is a tiny clay particle that you spray on to the leaves and the fruit. This acts as an irritant to the pests, causing them to move on. This has worked well so far, as we’ve already had our best cherry harvest yet, and the apples and pears still look pretty clean.