If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

I will devote a lot of space of this site, and lots of my time of course, on collecting and compiling publicly available information about the most common pests in organic gardening/farming in Canada. These articles will be categorized as Fact Sheet.

The Fact Sheet articles will follow a certain format, as follows:

• General Info – a general description of the pest
• Host Plants/Animals – the plant or animal that the pest rely on and do damage to;
•  Life Cycle of the pest – how the pest starts its life, develops into adult and what form(s) it takes;
• Damages they can inflict on their host plants and animals;
• Pest Control – commonly used non-chemical ways in managing the pests. As we are talking about organic gardening/farming, no chemical pesticides are allowed.

Let’s start with codling moth fact sheet. So what are codling moths? What do they look like? Where do they live? How do they infest apples? Do they have any biological enemies? How can we destroy them?

General Info

Codling Moth (cydia pomonella) is a commonly found pest, whose larvae can cause a lot of damages to fruits like apples and pears (you know I am talking from experience!) Depending on the climate and length of growing season, codling moths can reproduce 2 to 3 generations a year.

The images below are from an Australian source, but I assume (correct me if I am wrong) the codling moths look pretty much the same everywhere.

Host

Apple, Pear, Cherry, Peach, Apricot, Plum, Hawthorn, Crabapple, Walnut etc.

Life Cycle

The life of a codling moth starts with an egg, which is laid one at a time by a mature female codling moth after having mated with a male codling moth, on a leaf, twig or surface of a fruit. Eggs hatch in one to three weeks, into cream or pink larvae with a brown or black head which can grow to 20 mm. Codling moth larvae then find fruit to infest. Their entry point is usually the calyx or the opposite side of the fruit, or anywhere they find convenient. They dig into the fruit and tunnel through to the center of the fruit and continue tunneling inside the fruit until they are ready to pupate, approximately three weeks later. Then they exit the fruit, plugging the hole with frass. They find tree trunk or branch or garbage on the ground to pupate for about two to three weeks. After that, the second generation of moths emerge and are ready to mate and lay eggs during a two month period. Some warmer places can have three generations of codling moth a year.

Some larvae do not pupate and remain larvae until the following year. This is called overwintering. In mid to late April, those overwintering larvae pupate. And first adult coding moth usually emerges around bloom time. If you were wondering about the mature female codling moth which lays the egg in the first place, they are from the overwintering larvae!

Damages

The larvae tunnel into fruits and feed on them until ready to pupate. The entry point and exit holes are usually filled up with frass, or their excrements. Fruits infested with codling moth larvae often fall prematurely, but some might survive until harvest if the damage is only on the surface.

Control

Now that we know the codling moths from life to death, let’s see what we can do to control or manage those pests if we cannot eliminate them.

If you are saying to yourself that we can locate and destroy the overwintering larvae, that’s actually a great idea! We can look for silken cocoons in garbage bin, on dead leaves, twigs, branches, tree trunks, shed walls, tool handles, you name it! It’s going to be very time-consuming but definitely worth trying.

If we miss some codling moth larvae at our winter cocoon hunting, they are going to pupate and emerge as codling moths. Now they need to mate! They need to find a partner! Great, this is when pheromone traps come in. Mature female moths emit the pheromones, and males pick them up from far away. What if the pheromones are not emitted by a female moth but by a trap?

We will always miss some. Then we have our final defense: we can bag the fruit! Putting a bag around a fruit will almost certainly make it impossible for a tiny larvae to find its way to the fruit!

Thinning out the tiny apples, leaving one per cluster, might help too. If you have enough time, make sure that no apples touch leaves or twigs will largely affect the ability of the larvae to move onto the fruit! Better still, picking up codling moths from your fruit tree!

Note: This post has used some images from PaDIL, @ http://www.padil.gov.au/under the Creative Commons license.

The post Pest Control: Codling Moth Fact Sheet appeared first on EatingOrganic.CA.

While looking for some better-looking apples to bag, I found this small apple. It looked perfect, but when I lifted it to put a bag on, I realized that it was stuck to a leaf. Then I knew that it had already been infested. I had seen too many of those just the day before. I pulled at the leaf, and saw the tiny larva. And a hole on the apple.

While I was taking picture of the hole, I found another imperfection on the apple, a dent with a sealed hole – that was likely the entry point of another codling moth larva. The larva must have entered a long while ago, and the poor apple tried to heal itself by covering up the hole.

This is how it looks when opened up:

Here is my theory as to how the codling moths infest apples:

1. A codling moth lays eggs on a leaf. Or a twig;
2. When the eggs hatch, the larvae start looking for apples to infest. As they are not capable of moving at great lengths, and apparently they are not able to jump or fly, the only possible way to get onto an apple is where the twig or leaf the larvae are on physically touch the apple.
3. The larvae move onto an apple and start eat their way into the apple. In the process, their excrements stuck the apple and leave or twig.
4. When the larva is mature enough to pupate, it exits the apple. If the apples gets lucky, or big enough, the larva does not get to its core yet before exiting, the apple might actually survive.

This apple was still on the tree, I cut it off just to see what had deformed it.

It’s apparent that a codling moth larva had called it home for a while before leaving to pupate, mate and lay eggs just to infest more apples. Looks like I had lost the battle even before it started. My first encounter with codling moths has totally failed! Dealing with codling moths will not be easy, but I am determined! I am going to be your worst nightmare (if you actually dream, that is). Codling moths, you are now officially declared my enemy! I will find every little dirty secret of yours and destroy you!

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Searches for bags turned up some YouTube video and webpages about bagging apples using Ziploc bags. Wow, that’s just what I need!

So I set up my ladder and looked for good apples to bag. There were one or two that were absolutely clean and clear of any sign of damage. Yes, you read correctly. One or two, out of maybe two or three hundred apples that are still left on the trees!

Looks like it IS too late. And you know, man, it hurts. Badly. The dreams of eating those delicious organic apples from my own backyard! Oh, what a shame!

I had rejoiced in picking one little cucumber or a couple cherry tomatoes from my yard, congratulating myself on my first successful season of organic gardening! Oh how stupid of me! By neglecting my apple trees, I must have lost hundreds of dollars’ worth of apples! Those little apples have been falling dozens everyday day, probably hoping that they might somehow get my attention so that I could save their fellow apples! They fell everywhere! On the grass, on my cherry potatoes and cucumber plants! Even on my head! But I just ignored them.

Looking at those ugly apples, with holes, brownish excrements all over, deformed, I could not help but think of Zoombies. Say you know that some people have been bitten and have become zombies, but it hurts the most when you realize that some good friends of yours have been bitten and are turning into zombies. There are still others that you are not sure if they have been bitten or not. Or if they will actually turn into zoombies if they are just scratched. That’s what happens with my apples.

I know most of the apples are gone! They are lost to the larvae. When there is a hole on the apple, chances are they already left to pupate. If they had got to the core of the apple, the apple is done! It will just rot away and fall prematurely!

After bagging maybe a dozen good and not so good apples, I realized that that’s not the best thing to do. If I leave those uglier ones out there, codling moths are going to get them and it would be just as if I feed those apples to them. I could not do that. Finally, I decided to bag each and every of those apples that still look like apples. Just like those would-be zombies. You cannot kill your friends thinking that they must have been  infected. You have to try all you can to save them.

So, I am going to

• bag those good apples, so that codling moths will no longer have access to them and will have to leave them alone;
• bag those not so good-looking ones, so that they would not be infested by codling moths, although they might have been infested with something else. By bagging them, there could be at least a chance that they will survive;
• bag those that were apparently infested with codling moths, as there was a hole, or there were brownish excrements. Doing so, I hope that when the larvae, if they are still inside the apples, want to move to other places to pupate, they will be trapped inside the bag, thus terminating its life cycle.

I will be monitoring those bagged apples very closely.

Update: It looks like you need to prick the bags or cut the corners of the plastic bag to drain rain water. But will codling moth larvae find their way in from those holes? We will see…

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I have a couple of apple trees in my backyard. Last year, only one apple was found. To be accurate, just half of it hanging lonesomely in the tree. Guess the other half was shared by birds.

When the trees burst into blossoms in the spring, I was thrilled, thinking that I would have plenty of organic apples come the fall.

Look what I have two months later.

And this,

It’s apparent my tree is sick and the apples are infested with pests. This might be the hard way to learn some pest control techniques in organic gardening. So I went to the library and found this book: The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control from Rodale. Here is what I found:

Fruit with holes surrounded by brown, crumbly excrement. Cause: Codling moths. Adults appear in early spring and lay eggs in trees within 2 to 6 weeks of blossom time. Eggs hatch into larvae within 5 to 14 days. The fat, white or pinkish, 7/8-inch caterpillars tunnel through fruit and may be gone by the time you find the holds, which may be filled with frass, waste material that resembles moist sawdust…. Infested apples may drop early;

So that’s it. Codling moths are the culprit. Those are making tunnels in my apples.

I found another (well, it’s not that difficult to find one, but…) apple on the tree with the above-quoted symptom. I opened it, voilà!

Having stumbled upon organic gardening, I am ill-prepared for pest control and disease control. I knew it would not be easy, but I had only a very vague notion of pest, or pest control. This will be a very good opportunity for me to gain some real experience in organic gardening.

I am going to follow the methods to control the codling moths, and will share with you my progress. Stay tuned.

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