A Note About our Z-Orchard Practices

When researching practices used in orchards for pest control, I visited with a lot of people. I wanted to find the best practices with minimum amount of spraying of chemicals that I could find. Over the past 15 years we have tried many things and have found any organic practices we try are usually very labor intensive. One example is Thinning the fruit. We clip excess by hand; many orchards use chemicals to abort a portion of the flowers to thin the fruit. Ideally the apples should be thinned to the point that when they become full sized, the apples do not touch one another. When properly thinned you do not loose production (bushels) as the fruit is larger and trees put all of the energy into less fruit. An example is: If we spray to thin the apples it would take a couple of hours. Thinning 250 trees by hand easily takes a couple of weeks with much of the work done from ladders.

One of the people who I had discussions with was the late George Motz of Balsam Lake, WI. He told me that he had an orchard for 40 years, never sprayed and never had a real worm problem. He said he always kept geese in the orchard. The concept is that the geese will keep the ground free from apples that drop and also catch a lot of insects. The idea sounded good to me. I had geese in the orchard for several years, but now the USDA rules do not allow livestock in the Orchard.

I now use traps and lures to catch and detour the insects. Now I am using red Solo Cups covered with “Tanglefoot”. This product is sticky like long lasting fly paper and the red cups attract the female apple maggot flies and is very effective. We also use a special cardboard wrapped tightly around the trunk of the trees to catch Codling Moth larva. It is effective and very labor intensive as you need to change the cardboards monthly. We also have tried several other procedures with some success. ANYTHING you try organically is usually labor intensive. I experiment with an organic citric spray with limited success. Overall, these pest control practices do a good job on a small orchard like mine.

There is a natural lime spray used on the trees before they blossom. The lime is a natural product designed to smother any insect eggs hiding on the bark of the trees.

― Bill Z.

Owner, Z-Orchard