Fruity bugs

[Aaroncartwright]

Hi!

I have 2 apple trees. 1 pear and 1 damson. I have only just moved into my house last year and dnt have much experience with fruit trees. Last year a lot of the fruit was destroyed by bugs! This year I was hoping to spray them all with something. They are quite big so I don't want to spray them all with a hand held sprayer, think my finger will cramp up. I have an attachment on my hose that I could fill with something and spray the trees with it.

My question Is what do I put in the attachment on the hose that will mix with the water and protect my fruit from bugs. Please any help will be appreciated. Thank you

Regards
Aaron

[starloc]

It depends what type of bugs, many do no real harm so are best left alone things like greenfly and similar its better just to ignore them and let ladybirds eat them, if theres loads of them try squishing them a bit to cut numbers down

Theres specific insecticides for various groups of insects and usualy a better way to avoid them like wasps are avoided by a bottle with sugary water in,

Other methods save spraying food with poison and more importantly many of the insecicides kill good insects as well, like bees, if the bees die there will be nothing to pollinate, so no bugs on the tree but there will still be no fruit.

A fairly safe thing to spray, the (safest thing that works to spray) is an oil spray, a spoon of oil and a tiny drop of dishwash liquid in a litre of water, sunflower oil works, neem oil is a natural insectacide, on commercial fruit they tend to use `horticultural oil` that can be anything from mineral oil to veg oil , used the same way it works well for most pests, the standard oils work by suffocating pests and making the plant slippy the neem oil is an actual insecticide pests if not suffocated just stop eating and sit there till they die.

To spray use a pump up spray bottle, they can reach quite a hight and if spraying a narrow spray are powerfull enough to knock insects ( and leaves and fruit ) off the trees

[Two_Sheds]

Last year a lot of the fruit was destroyed by bugs!

You have to be a bit more specific about what bugs ... what damage did you notice? When?

You could just spray everything with poison, but then you'd be harming good wildlife (esp. bees) when you don't need to. If you want perfect fruit and no wildlife with minimum effort, you might just as well buy your fruit at Tesco