I strongly recommend Bt. I've used it pretty successfully in the battle against the Helicoverpa spp on tomatoes, eggplants and occasionally capsicums. You do have to keep it up though - I spray once a week in the warm weather, once I've noticed damage. (You won't see the moths, they're nocturnal). It works well and cheaply for me in my smallish garden. If you have 10 acres of tomatoes it might get a bit tedious! Bt has to be ingested to work. The fruit-worm eggs are laid on leaves or the outside of buds/fruit, so you do have a window of opportunity to get the little buggers, but not a large one and, as you say, once they eat their way into the fruit they're out of harm's way and the fruit is ruined. I make sure to spray any developing fruit that I notice. I still lose some tomatoes and the occasional eggplant to them in the height of summer, but I'm OK with that. Apart from being extremely effective, Bt is also only toxic to caterpillars, so it won't kill the beneficial insects that attack fruit-worm eggs - tiny Trichogramma wasps, for example. Tracey

Hi Justin I use a cup of urine to 2 cups water, with a tablespoon of bovril or vegemite added and a tablespoon of honey. I use soft drink bottles with holes drilled in top about size of five cent pies and attach to fence with wire. I suppose I put about 3/4 cup in each bottle. A sure fire recipe for green ants is a small can of cat food with three drops of frontline mixed in. No more. (The ants carry the poison to the nest), place in jar with 10 cent sixe holes in lid and secure in branches of tree, out of reach of other animals. Jan

I would say, scientifically, my results are inconclusive. Anecdotally, heat does not interfere with fruit set on my peppers, and, like Humsi, may even be helpful. However, the correlation of temperature:fruit set may be more related to WHEN my peppers normally set fruit, irrespective of the temperature. My peppers really start to kick off with the flowers later in the season, late July-August because peppers are just slower. Since I grow a lot of early-mid season determinate tom's, many of them have already set, and maybe even ripened, most of their fruit. This also corresponds with when we often see some our most brutal summer heat. Correlation does not always equal causation. I will say that WATERING has much more of an effect on fruit set than temperatures with my peppers. I grow them in containers and while I do let them get fairly dry between watering, if I let them go a little too far (which I do, from time to time) the flowers will be all over the ground the next day. If they are adequately watered, however, the heat doesn't seem to bother them in the least. Again, like Humsi, we often have humidity that barely breaks out of the single digits (today it was 9%, so low the heat index was 6 degrees cooler than the ambient air temperature.)

I have to watch out for fruit flies, too. In the long harvest season, I always have baskets of fresh picked veggies on the counter, either from my gardens or other's. I've found that wrapping my individual tomatoes (for example) in newspaper or paper towels will protect them from fruitflies and over ripening. I have a couple of small jars filled with a solution of apple cider vinegar, water, and dish detergent to trap any fruitflies. Trap and release fruit flies, lololol. Don't do it, Alisande! Fruit flies are like plant vermin.....trap and release rats or cockroaches.