Fruit Trees and Pests that Love Them

Planting a beautiful fruit tree in your garden can do more than spruce up your yard it can also bear the sweetest fruit around. However, because the fruit is sweet you have potential predators waiting just as eagerly for your harvest as you are. You have to recognize certain pests that can disturb the growth of your fruit tree and learn how to avoid them. This article will give you information on the different types of pests that could be waiting to take a bite out of your delicious plants.

Aphids (plant lice): These tiny insects love to attack fruit foliage. Aphids are small, soft-bodied insects that suck the juice from the leaves, eventually causing them to curl and or crinkle. They are usually green, brown, or black in color and a potential danger to your harvest.

Cankerworms: These loopers as well as others love munching down on fresh leaves and young fruits of trees. When they are disturbed, they will drop and hang suspended on strands of silk. Cankerworms will likely disappear by the late spring or early summer.

Codling Moths: Codling moths are the ones who are responsible for apples or pears being wormy. Their larvae eat through the flesh of the apples. Once the skin of the apple is broken, the codling moths burrow tunnels through the fruit filling it with a brown debris.

Cyclamen Mites: These are very tiny insects that live in the crown of strawberry plants. They attack the leaves and flower buds of the plant. The leaves eventually become brown and wrinkled on the tips. Cyclamen mites have the potential to prevent fruit formation and or cause misshapen fruit.

Fall Webworms: Watch out for these pests. They develop in large web nests on the branches of fruit trees usually in the late summer or fall. They will eat your leaves in and around their nest. You can destroy the nests by pruning off branches and burning the nest as soon as they appear.

Leafhoppers: These are green, gray, or tan and about 1/8 inch long. They feed on the undersides of fruit leaves. The young leafhoppers love to suck the juice from the leaves. Be careful, these little pests can transmit diseases from one tree to the other.

Lesser Peach-Tree borers: If you love fruit trees, so will these insects. They attack stone-fruit tree trunks and scaffold branches, particularly where pruning wounds and other injuries make their penetration more feasible. You should look for gummy exudates when dealing with these borers.

Peach tree borers: These insects also work at base of a stone-fruit tree. Sawdust castings and gummy masses at the base of the trunk will indicate that the borers have inhabited there.

Plum Curculios: Snout beetles, another name for these creatures. They deposit eggs into young fruit trees. Their egg punctures are crescent-shaped the same as the plum gouger. When plum curculios deposit their eggs, the fruit will become damaged and will generally turn red prematurely and fall from the tree.

Plum Gougers: This is also a type of snout beetle. They also deposit eggs in stone fruits while the fruit is small. Their larvae burrow into the pit and emerge as adults, leaving a matchstick-sized hole in the fruit. If you want to get rid of these pests spread a canvas in early morning under the infested tree; then strike the trunk of the tree with a padded mallet or shake it vigorously. Get rid of and destroy all of the beetles that fall onto the canvas. You will want to repeat this procedure in four-day intervals until no more beetles are found.

Scale Insects: These are small sucking tiny bugs. They are about a 1/10-inch long and they remain attached to a branch or twig. An Oyster Scale is brownish in color and has a shape similar to an oyster shell. Scurfy Scales are white and pear-shaped.

Spider Mites: These tiny mites suck juices from leaves causing the leaves to eventually become bronzed and dried. Once the leaves reach this stage they will fall from the tree. These mites are frequently troublesome in dry years and the production of fine webs on the undersides of leaves can detect their presence. By hosing the tree with water from a garden hose, can help control these pests.

I hope that God-willing this article will help you have a beautiful fruit harvest.