Some people have had good success putting small plastic bags around their fruit. You can do a search of this forum for "bag". The link below might be helpful. Why mess with a bunch of chemicals if you don't have to?

Here is a link that might be useful: Fruit baggers: lets talk about it

Smhl:

I am an enthusiastic bagger of apples and peaches (plastic ziplocs for apples, nylon footies for peaches), but have not found bagging practical for apricots or nectarines, and surely not cherries.

The most serious early threat to apricots in the VA climate is the plum curculio, and the most effective insecticide is Imidan on about 1-week to 10 day schedule, depending on weather. Imidan is now very hard to obtain, but Permethrin, available as a liquid, is also effective against PC and is widely available. Once the apricots are past the tender skin stage -- about a month -- they seem less attractive to the PC and you can ease up on the spraying. Early maturing apricot varieties like Tomcot and Goldcot are most practical for the East. The larger, later, California types like Wilson and Tilton tend to split before fully ripe, and, as they sweeten up are subject to the oriental fruit moth that normally is active later in the season. I have two Tomcots, a Goldcot, and a Puget Gold, and have just finished thinning them, spacing them out and removing all the smaller fruits that are falling behind the others.

I have tried a half dozen varieties of nectarine, and have given up on them entirely. All the trees have been removed and replaced with things I can actually grow. Nectarines are subject to various fungal diseases and rots, and are extremely attractive to the PC and OFM, so much so that no amount of spraying seems to help. I tried bagging nectarines both in plastic and nylon, and both failed. I hope you have better luck with them than I did.

I have grown tart cherries for many years with no growing season sprays at all, although I do spray the trees with oil and copper in the dormant season. The only real threat to cherries is the cherry fruit fly, which can be dealt with by cultural practices -- cleaning up all the cherries that might harbor larvae, and cultivating around the base of the trees to expose the pupae to cold and drying. Sweet cherries are similarly bulletproof to insects, but most of the larger, West Coast varieties are subject to cracking late in their ripening season due to our VA combination of heat and humidity. Nothing can be done about this but to shift to varieties like Lapins.

The above, of course, deals only with threats to the fruit itself. Apricot trees can develop fungal diseases like shothole on the leaves, as can nectarines and peaches. Cherry leaves can be attractive to aphids (hence the dormant sprays with oil to kill overwintering eggs), and sweet cherry leaves are very, very, very attractive to deer.

Weather variations can bring different problems each season; lots of insects one season, and fungal problems the next. You have to be alert and observant, and try to head off problems as they occur. One season most of my apricots suffered from a surface mildew that hardened the skins and stopped growth of the fruit. That is why I mix in a fungicide like Captan or Topsin with the early sprays on apricots. Since I began doing this, I have not seen that mildew problem again.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Don's the man to listen to for growing in our area. I live in suburban Maryland and agree with him: once your nectarines and apricots start to grow -- and I mean basically, as soon as the petals fall -- the curculio will come. They like apples too, and although I have never had an apple crop until this year, they have already attacked some of the young apples before all the petals have fallen. Fortunately petal fall has just ended and I could get a spray on them last night and the damage will be minor. You can go out and tell if your fruit has already been attacked: if it has, there will be a small crescent bitten into the fruit where the curculio lays its egg. So much for that fruit! Make sure you clean up all dropped fruit to break the curculio's life cycle.

I had some luck with nectarines last year. I used footies (the small stockings shoe stores use when you try on shoes), which I attached after spraying and the fruit had grown a little -- about the size of a large marble. I managed to get about a 1/2 dozen good sized nectarines after spraying and bagging. I am not sure whether the small number was due to curculio damage I misssed, or rather to the freeze we had last year which devasted fruit. I also noted that last year there were few bees on the plant, while this year it was crawling in bees. My neighbor got about a bushel of nectarines just using the mixed 'fruit tree' sprays they sell at garden stores, which he applied a few times after petal fall. For what it's worth, we are both growing the Mericrest variety. Boy, it was good to eat a real nectarine as opposed to the hockey pucks sold in the stores.

Smh1, you're about to get a rude awakening: growing most common fruits is an ongoing battle. The enemies are diseases, pests, and weather. The reward for winning the battle is a little taste of heaven. Rule #1. Pick your battles carefully. Look around for neglected or abandoned fruit trees that are still bearing to get a hint of what might work the best in your area: a couple of generations ago they didn't even have pesticides. Also check out ediblelandscaping.com for a wide selection of minimum maintainance fruit trees.

Fruithack:

A couple of generations ago they did indeed use pesticides, and well before that. They were much, much worse than the worst that are used today.

Would you believe arsenate of lead, to cite just one example? There are a dozen others, nearly as bad. It's wonder our forefathers and foremothers survived.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

You're right, Don. Nasty indeed. The whole game was different though. 80 % of U.S. population was rural, and mechanization was minimal. Integrated pest management didn't exist, nor corporate agri-business. The chemical compounds available were much more basic, used in minimal quantities, and manually applied. It would be interesting to find out the annual tonnage of pesticides consumed in the U.S. every year, also the per acre usage. I get a lot of my information from talking to very old third generation Italian farmers in California's San Jouquin valley. As they say, it ain't like it used to be, but then it never was.

I'm guessing we don't face nearly the amount of problems in California as the east coast due to climate, etc.

When I read what the gardeners have to do back east I admire them for their perseverance and dedication. All I do is spray some copper and dormant oil and if I don't no big deal. The biggest threat to my fruit trees is squirrels and my dogs so far have kept them away this year.

Wasn't tobacco tea used back in the day and isn't that fairly toxic? I remember reading a book (fiction) about Pasadena CA and they were spraying the orange groves in the summer (90 - 100 deg. F) with kerosene!

Is there such a thing as a fruit catch net? Something that can be either tied to the bottom branches of a tree, or staked under it to catch dropping fruit? My fruit trees are in with my flower garden and it can be quite a job to collect the fruit when they fall into it.