2 years ago we planted a lot of fruit trees (different varieties of apple, pear and plum). Some of them already carried some fruit last year, but a lot more trees where carrying fruit this year. Most trees actually blossomed this spring, but due to the wetter conditions not all where pollinated. This spring was cold, wet and windy, which is not ideal for bees to fly around, collect nectar and pollinate along the way. That’s why we where so happy to see different trees building fruit, the greater the disappointment seeing fruit starting to fall.
When the fruit was still small I know fruit trees tent to drop some of there fruit, so I did not think much about that. By the time August came more and more fruit started to fall and we found all of the fruit having a maggot inside. Especially striking where all of the plum variety trees. Some of the trees where packed with fruit, but a lot of fruit started falling to the ground.
From the early varieties we where able to eat some of the fruit directly from the tree, but I checked all for maggots before eating. More and more fruit started to fall and at one point we just harvested all of the fruit of the trees, even if it was not ripe yet.
While cleaning them I found a few that where kind off ripe enough for fresh eating, about half of the plums I trough away because they had maggots in them. With the other half I made plum sauce, where I did at a little sugar, since most of the fruit was still a bit sour.
Because of the maggot problem I had actually purchased plums to can for winter. If we did not had this much maggots, we would have had enough fruit from our own trees.
After researching in the internet I learned that the fruit falling in the spring is already due to maggots and we need to collect all of the fruit that falls to the ground to lower the maggot pressure. The plum moth produces at least 2 generations in our region, so if we can reduce the maggots by removing the first fruit that is dropped, we should clearly have fewer maggots by the time the fruit ripens.
Another help against the maggots in our fruit are bats, since they eat the moth’s. In the past years we had seen only 2, but recently we have noticed 6 bats flying around. Hopefully they will help reducing the general moth pressure around our trees. I do not mind losing some of the fruit, to keep the predators’ around, but almost all is a bit hard.
Our task for winter and next season to reduce the maggot problem is checking if we can find any cocoons underneath the plum trees (winter job) and picking up and removing any fruit that falls to the ground in the new season. Hopefully next year we can actually use the fruit from our trees instead of purchasing fruit.
Beautiful Chaos 