We have 30 fruit trees of various types. (apple, peach, nectarine, plum,pear, asian pear, cherry) We planted 9 years ago. We have tried to be organic and I spray Neem Oil regularly. This past summer I sprayed literally every 7-10 days. We've also had leaf curl pretty bad in the peach and nectarine so over the past several years I have sprayed copper fungicide. We had peaches this summer for the first time in 5 years.
Even though I spray Neem, and I started spraying at bud, we still have buggy fruit...especially the apples. What do you do to protect your organic fruit?
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We've had our property for 2 years and it has about 24 apple and cherry trees. Other than hanging Irish Spring soap to deter deer last year, we've not sprayed or done anything but prune. I've noticed a couple of trees have apple rust which hasn't appeared to harm the trees. They didn't fruit at all this year ( I think I pruned the fruiting stems) so I haven't determined if the rust will harm fruit.
As for insects, I make it a habit to view the trees and hand pluck caterpillars/insects for the chickens. I worry more about the deer.
Some other good things: keep all dropped fruit picked up and disposesd of, let your chickens and geese run in the orchard, try bagging the fruit(if it is free of worms first) look into kaolin clay to coat the fruit.
There is some sort of clay ( kaolin clay?) That you can coat apples with to keep the bugs off of them.
I've tried putting footies onto peaches and that stopped the birds, but the earwigs got in
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