paghat wrote:

In article , sherwindu
wrote:

I have religiously cleaned all fruit from my backyard. I tried all
these traps,
and still the insects have come. There are no other fruit trees in my
neighborhood
to account for this infestation. The traps help somewhat, but don't do
a complete job.

But you're dead wrong in your belief that a few trees in the backyard are
less apt to respond to organic principles.

Thats not what I said.

You're dead wrong that the body
of knowledge developed at experimental horticultural stations & put into
practice by organic growers have no application to the backyard orchard.

Again, no what I said. I have incorporated several organic methods into
my backyard, some of which have had limited results. I do feel that the
organic methods cannot do the complete job of protecting the fruit.


Since you refuse to adhere to any method that does not permit you to see
everything die right before your eyes in a matter of seconds, you'll never
have a clue how easy organic gardening can be. It's not something you try
for a month on one tree then discard -- you have a toxified diseased
property & to establish any holistic semblance of an organic balance would
require more than you quickly discarding all organic techniques.

I don't know why paghat keeps talking about commercial orchards. We are
home gardeners,
who grow things in our backyards, on a much smaller scale. Insect
damage is more
distributed in a large commercial orchard, so if a small percentage of
the trees get hit,
there are many others to take up the slack. That is not the case of a
home orchard,
where you have only a handful of trees, usually one tree per variety.
If one of those
trees gets hit, you have lost that variety of fruit for the season.

That's pretty irrational stuff you've trundled out there. Organic gardens
are healthier gardens; they are not more prone to insect attack, they are
less prone. You have to keep using toxins because dependence breeds
dependence, not because there is no better way.

Even more intriguingly however, you previously you argued the opposite:

A commercial orchard cannot closely monitor the effects of hundreds of
trees, and therefore takes a 'blanket' approach to control.

So which irrational thought are you promoting? Only big orchards can be
organic because they can afford more diseases, while back yards can't be
organic because that one tree will surely be dieased? Or only back yard
growers can be organic because they can focus on each plant, but big
orchards MUST take a blanket approach with toxins?

Organic growers must limit their varieties of fruit to disease resistant cultivars
or they will soon be out of business. Backyard orchardists can do a better
job of spraying if they are knowlegable, mainly because they don't have to
monitor hundreds of trees.



You are shifting the argument back & forth so that you can continue to
believe toxins are next to godliness, & you're not sounding rational.

In reality QUALIFIED commercial orchards easily monitor their trees just
as will any skillful backyard orchardist. But lazy second-rate growers &
backyard amateurs might not bother, & thus frequently end up with a toxic
pig-apple harvest.

Not all backyard orchardists are lazy.



But yes, from the chemical-dependent grower's point of view, shortcuts are
the only important thing, even if the shortcuts are illusory & based on
ignorance.

Believe me, like any business, the organic commercial growers take shortcuts
if it saves them time and money.

If you create an unhealthy environment & try to fix it with
poisons instead of with improved horticultural techniques, obviously you
just set yourself up for a cycle of seasonal failures -- & every time you
MUST use toxins to keep things from going away, that's evidence of failure
which begets failure. If it SEEMS to be a shortcut, it is indeed apt to
count for much more than quality, valuation, blance, health, & safety.

This is why commercial organic growers are on the cutting edge of today's
orchard industry & are not bankrupting at the same staggering rate as
chemical-dependent growers. Organic apples have an expanding marketplace;
the chemical-dependent have whiners & complainers wishing George Bush
would bail them out the graves they dug for themselves. It's also why
promoters of chemical swill have to pretend very clear findings from the
same horticultural stations & USDA can't possibly be right if a hand-out
from Ortho or Monsanto says otherwise.

I really don't care about commercial growers and neither should you. This
newsgroup is for home gardeners. If you want to wage your campaign against
commercial growers, seek another newsgroup.



You should also mention that these traps are very expensive, especially
the pheromones. I have
not noticed any significant retardation of insect attacks using them, so
I will not rely
solely on their effectiveness.

No pheramones are used to trap apple maggots

I meant to say Codling Moths. The pheremones attract the moths to
the trap, where they get ensnarred.

, so what in the world are you
doing? Everything incorrectly, obviously.

If you can afford jugs of gawdawful expensive chemicals, you can afford $3
sticky traps, as that's the cheapest on the market; really pretty ones
made as much for human delight rather than just to attract pests can cost
ten or twelve dollars each. And sure, you COULD pay $20 or even more if
you'd rather have a really decorative one with a nice green leaf sticking
out of the top -- even those are pretty cheap since you can re-used
forever, recharging them with scented sticky-bait, which is cheap.

That's why I have given up on pheremones, and gone over to sticky balls.
However, it is no easy task to smear that stuff on, hang them up, and then
take them down.



The traps are not hard to make at home for nothing, even an old christmas
tree ornament will do the trick -- the total cost would be for the baited
glue, which if you get screwed for the price it might cost $7 for enough
of the scented sticky bait to charge three old ornaments from the attic or
thrift store if you were too damned cheap to spring for a manufactured
trap -- the total cost for the year could be less than many of us pay for
coffee in a single day (chai in my case lately). Since the traps work
pretty well even without the scented lure, you could just recharge the
ornament with tanglefoot -- that'll save you on that goshawful expense of
$7 for the baited equivalent.

As for pheramones, you were talking about apple maggot lures. The scented
bait does NOT consist of pheramones. They are food bacteria -- they
attract most of the fruit-targetting flying pests of which apple maggot is
the biggest nuisance, & do it without killing fifteen kinds of beneficial
insects that also protect the trees.

I meant to address the Codling Moths when refering to pheramones. However,
I also tried the attractant sold for apple maggot flies, which was also very expensive.
I now rely strictly on sticky balls.

Nowadays the lure is built right into
the product's sticky component so it costs nothing extra for its first
year's use. You can buy the baited glue separately to make home-made traps
or revitalize an old ones you say you paid too much for. It's nonsense to
say this is too expensive while you spend a far greater fortune on toxins.

And if your low level of knowledge in these matters really did cause you
to put some sort of costly pheramone in an overpriced decorative trap

I was going for Codling Moths, so my approach was valid.

,
you've nothing to blame but your own ignorance that it didn't work & it
cost too much. And this kind of insanity is how your "personal experience"
taught you organic methods are no good is it? Criminy!

-paghat the ratgirl
--
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"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot." -Thomas Jefferson