So you want to know why your tomatoes get black spots and rot away or why you lose most of your peach crop to black spots and maggots.
Two words that can strike fear into any fruit tree or vegetable grower – FRUIT FLY!
Whether you have one fruit tree in a pot or a commercial orchard Queensland fruit fly can have devastating effects.
These files can sting up to 100 different varieties of fruit and vegetables such as Peach, nectarine, grapefruit, pear, avocado, grape, cumquat, apricot, orange, fig, tomato, eggplant, passionfruit, lemon, apple, loquat, chili, capsicum and strawberries.
Queensland Fruit Fly is an Australian Native insect. This native insect though is recognised as one of the world's worst fruit pests - it used to be estimated that it cost Australian fruit growers more than $100 million each year.
For many years it was just Queenslanders that used to have to suffer the trials of Fruit Fly devastation. Unfortunately fruit fly has not been well managed and many parts of NSW and Victoria have now also been declared Fruit Fly zones.
The adult Queensland Fruit Fly is only about 7 mm long and reddish brown with yellow markings. They lay their eggs in ripe fruit, their babies - maggots then hatch from the eggs and tunnel through the flesh of the fruit turning it into a brown, filthy inedible pulp. Affected fruit is recognised by a small sting mark that becomes discoloured and rot develops around.
Whether you grow one fruit tree or 100 we are all responsible for keeping this pest under control.
Some easy things to do
prune your fruit trees regularly, keeping the tops of the trees to a manageable height which makes fruit picking easier.
Remove any ripe fruit from fruit trees before it has a chance to fall to the ground
Most importantly collect fallen fruit from the ground and preferably place it into a black plastic bag and leave in the sun for 3-7 days to kill any maggots in the fruit.
Another easy way to help reduce the amount of fruit files is to use a trap. Searles Fruit Fly Trap attracts and kills the male fruit fly.
If there are no males in the area the female is unable to reproduce and moves on. The trap has a wick inside a container. The wick contains the pheromone of a female fruit fly in season, coupled with an insecticide. Traps are hung in an area near the fruit trees and can do an area of up to 500m. The wick lasts for three months and a replacement wick can be bought.
I change my wick at the turn of every season. Fruit fly usually have a dormancy period during the colder months but I have found our winters aren't really affecting them like they used too so I keep my trap going all year long.
My first season of using this method I was catching a small vegemite container of Fruit Flies a week!
In conjunction with my trap I used to use eco-naturalure but this has now been replaced by Yates Nature's Way Fruit Fly Control. Yates Nature's Way Fruit Fly Control is a BFA registered organic fruit fly control spray for both male and female flies.
It combines specific food based attractants which target only fruit flies, and bacteria derived insecticide, spinosad, that leads to an almost instantaneous death.
You can also use fruit fly netting and fruit protection bags which are specially designed netting that you can use to cover your fruit trees or individual fruit.
I honestly believe that if every household had a fruit fly trap we could get on top of this horrendous outbreak.