Protect Fruit Trees from Pesky Pests

Strategies to stop pests from damaging your fruit

Pests that eat fruit are a fruitgrower’s nightmare! You’ve put a lot of love and energy into growing perfect fruit, now it’s absolutely vital to learn simple strategies in place to make sure YOU get to eat it, and not the pests!

Fruit is sweet and delicious, that’s why we grow it, right? Unfortunately there are lots of insect pests who agree, and want to use OUR fruit as their food source.

Crawling insects like earwigs, flying insects like carpophilus beetles, insects that lay their eggs in our fruit like fruit fly, or insects that suck out your fruit’s life juices like Rutherglen or harlequin bugs—they have many different ways of eating it, but the end result is the same—they wreck our fruit!

Then there’s all the pests that will target the tree itself, from from tiny ones like aphids or pear and cherry slug, right through to bigger animals like rabbits, hares, kangaroos, or even deer. Some pests eat leaves, some eat (or damage) bark, or buds, or wood—or the whole jolly tree!

It’s easy to find advice to kill pests with chemicals, but there are many reasons that’s a bad idea—it’s putting poison on your food, it kills predator insects (who eat the pests), it damages the environment, the chemicals are dangerous to handle, and rather than making the problem go away, it makes it come back worse than ever the following year.

For pests that attack trees there are lots of potential solutions, including different types of tree guard, exclusion netting, trapping, fencing, electric fences or repellants—but which one(s) will work for you?

Over a long career as organic orchardists, we’ve come up with solutions and strategies to let you successfully grow organic fruit without needing to use chemicals at all.

The combination of articles, video and activities in this course will help you identify the damage caused by different pests, and guide you to decide which prevention strategies will work best, and how to put them into place. You’ll have at your fingertips a range of tips, techniques and principles for growing a thriving organic garden where the pests are naturally controlled, and your fruit is safe.

Whatever pests your fruit trees are faced with, it’s a relief to discover that there are strategies that will work!

What’s included in this course:

Module 1: Protect fruit from pests

• Unit 1: Keep insect pests out of your trees (article)
• Unit 2: Spotlight on apple dimpling bug (article)
• Unit 3: Spotlight on earwigs & garden weevils (article)
• Unit 4: Protect nectarines from earwig damage (video)
• Unit 5: Look what we found under the cherry trees (video)
• Unit 6: Spotlight on carpophilus beetle (article)
• Unit 7: Spotlight on Rutherglen & harlequin bugs (article)
• Unit 8: Spotlight on fruit fly (article)

Module 2: Pests that attack trees (not fruit)

• Unit 1: Spotlight on fruit tree borer (article)
• Unit 2a: Spotlight on aphids (article)
• Unit 2b: Write an aphid management plan (activity)
• Unit 3: Spotlight on pear and cherry slug (article)
• Unit 4: Protect your fruit trees from big animals (article)
• Unit 5: Keep large pests away from fruit trees (video)
• Unit 6a: Spotlight on rabbits and hares (article)
• Unit 6b: Large pest audit (activity)
• Unit 7: Spotlight on grasshoppers (article)