This is the first day of actual picking of nectarines: the first day...
It's so much that I've started out by bottling, to get the biggest and nicest fruit bottled for later:
People on the gardening groups I'm in keep asking me how I keep fruit fly from my fruit. But when I tell them I net the entire tree, they keep on going back to smaller options.
Can't they put out traps?
Can't they net the individual branches?
Why does it have to be the entire tree? Isn't that a lot of money and effort?
Yes, yes it is. But it's more money and effort to throw out an entire harvest that you've spent 8 months of the year preparing for because the fruit fly got to it. It's the effort and money that you spent for those 8 months of the year, because you couldn't be bothered spending 2 hours setting up a frame for netting to go over the tree.
The first year I didn't net a thing. Everything went to fruit fly. I didn't get a single fruit.
The next year, I set traps - dozens of traps. That didn't work either - again, all fruit was riddled with larvae and inedible.
The next year I netted individual branches. That partially worked - I got about 40% of the harvest.
And then last year, I netted the entire tree.
100% harvest. Every fruit on that tree was edible. They weren't always pretty and some of them developed mould before I could get around to picking them, but they weren't riddled with fruit fly the way the previous harvests were.
This year, again, I've netted the tree, and it's been ~99% effective. The 1% is because the tree is now too large for the net I had for it last year and there's a small crack in the net. But if I spot the holes, I feed them to the chooks, and the chooks are making short work of them (and they love the fruit flesh).
So when I say to fully net your tree, I'm saying I tried all the other steps and found that only fully netting the tree worked. I tried nickle-and-diming it back in the beginning, but I had to go all-out to successfully get a crop from non-sprayed trees.
Maybe you could get a good crop just by hanging up traps, but I can guarantee you a good crop by fully netting the tree with fruit fly exclusion netting.
Is it pretty? No, it's not.
But is it effective? Absolutely.
