Tino knows that the only thing worse than biting into an apple and finding a caterpillar, is biting into an apple and finding half a caterpillar! If this has ever happened to you, it’s likely the larvae of the Codling Moth, a common pest of apples, pears and even quinces.
To control any pest, it’s important to know their lifecycle – Codling Moth are gestating over winter either in the soil below the tree, or the nooks and crannies of the bark and bud unions. Once the weather warms up, the adults emerge, and lay their eggs on the tree or the young fruit. These eggs hatch, and the larvae chomp their way into your harvest, heading into the soil or bark to gestate as the weather heads back into autumn and winter. At this point, the cycle starts again.
Tino’s tried a few tricks to get rid of these troublesome pests, but one that has worked well over the last few years is suppression mulching. This involves using a nice, thick layer of organic mulch to prevent the adult moths emerging from the soil after their gestation. Tino builds his mulch layers up like a delicious lasagne:
Scrape back existing mulch around root zone
Add layer of compost
Add layers of cardboard, overlapping around the base of the tree
Add another layer of compost
Finish of with a nice thick layer of straw based mulch
Repeat process two or three times throughout the year
Another top Tino top is to wrap hessian around the trunk of the tree – this attracts the adult codling moths (mainly females) towards spring. After leaving this on the tree for a couple of weeks, it can be removed and throw into the bin, and the process repeated
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