Would the soft plastic flyscreen be pliable enough to tie at the ends without having to scrunch it? How big are fruit fly? Would something like tulle do the job?

FF are just a little smaller than the common house fly. I don't know what tulle is - is it like curtain netting?

Hi
I was going to bring-up this same subject. I lost about 20kg of tomatoes to fruit fly and half that amount to birds. So FF was my single biggest problem this season. I'm really sick of the white maggots in my fruit. Often I can salvage something to eat from an infected fruit, but it doesn't taste the same, does it? So depressing when your trophy toms get whacked.

Tulle is a white fine mesh material that I am led to believe is used in veils in wedding gowns. I think I got mine from Spotlight. It would be ideal for the job providing you could keep it far enough away from the fruit so that the fly's proboscis couldn't reach the skin.

Personally, I am more interested in a chemical solution. Though I got a few fruit fly w/ pyrethrum the flies managed to get under the green inedible collar at the top of the fruit (forgotten its name) where there was no spray and they would sting the fruit right near the stem.

Another very, very important thing. Don't put any fruit scraps in your compost unless it is one of those black sealed drums. Bit annoying this as one's garbage bins soon fills up with bags of rotten tomatoes and it's out with the hose to clean the bin after garbage collection night. Add some seed fermentations and it all gets a bit rich.

But one colleague and her sister I gave seeds to in Melbourne really enjoyed the experience and they're hooked on gardening so that's great. And for them, in a really terrible season, what with all that rain, and no chemicals, Tommy Toe was robust and productive along with a few others being good like Cuostralee.

For me, fruit fly and birds and then cracking and rot from that big rain was trying. But I now know a bit more about what and what not to do in the patch and can't complain. It was a great season really and thankyou for your generosity.

My plan next season, when I have ADSL, is to establish a site so I can post pics more efficiently. I like the idea of being able to post a thread with lots of thumbnail pics in it that you can click for bigger images. EarlÂs got that worked out and soon so will I.

Grub, enjoying a cuppa and the terrific late-summer storms after a weekend of serious whitewater rafting, a near dislocated shoulder and my first sighting of a platypus in the wild.

Impressed with the platypus siting. I'll leave you to the white water rafting though.

You're right, the material has to be stiff enough to keep its shape and stay off the tomato's surface, otherwise the little demon will just lay its eggs right through the cover. Chemical solutions have the unfortunate side effect of killing off everything, as there's nothing that I know of that is specific to FF. I'm thinking a combination of some sort of protective cover and FF traps would reduce the problem to manageable, maybe even negligible proportions.
I'm sure I've read posts from Queenslanders who do just this and it seems to work for them. Any northeners out there who'd like to comment?
I also think rigorous garden hygiene is essential if you have FF - no fruit should be left lying round!

the birds leave my tomatoes alone up this way they just want all me mullberries and stone fruits etc.,. anyway i use the tried and tested for me anyway fruit fly traps my main weapon the fruit fly wick and i keep fresh wicks all through winter you'd be surprised how many f/fly males you can catch then making less around for the summer season. put the wick traps away from the fruit you want to protect that way youn encourage the fly to an area away from the wick.

damaged fruit needs to be litterally cooked before you can recycle it on sight, the best method is put it in a black garbage bag and in full sun for a couple of days. but all damged fruit has to be collected and destroyed so you don't help them prolificate. feeding damaged fruit to chooks is a good way to recycle the stuff and you get the benefit of healthier eggs.

len having a realy good season with the toms hardly any f/f damage. there are some interesting recipes and control methods on my remedies page.

mail len

lens garden page

Thanks for that Len. So these wicks, they attract the male, is that right? They then die in the trap and so can't be daddies? Neat. Where do you get your wicks/traps? I've noticed lots of FF control stuff on the Green Harvest web site.

Agree that this year was an atrocious year for fruit fly around Sydney. For the first time in the five years I've been growing tomatoes, I even lost some of my cherry tomatos to the blighters. They normally leave them pretty much alone.

I was told that puting stockings over the fruit would stop the fly but can now safely say that this is not true. Apart from the fly still getting at the fruit (probably as the stockings are quite tight on the fruit) I also had problems with the fruit staying wet for longer after rain so causing more rot and discolouration. Add to that the time it took me to cover each of the fruit and I finally resorted back to chemical means!

I will hopefully try the traps next year and see how that pans out for me.

They are seasonal as well aren't they.? I've finally got a fair whack of fruit on my toms, but no sign at all of fungii, or ff s, or any nasties at all. They seem to think the season is over.

g'day raymondo,

yep they kill the males so no males no fertile females is the reasoning, if you work the traps well this can give very good results, i had a very bad year last year due to being slack on the traps but this year great got some real nice ox hearts big fist size some of them and they taste great.

i buy mine from the produce agency i think they are called q-fly wicks. they say they last 6 months but i put new ones out about every 3 months leaving the older ones in place as well. using the bottle allows you to monitor the levles of flies being killed, so if a trap isn't working and you have flies then move the trap to some other spot.

if you looked on my remedies page that diesel air-wick idea was touted by the person who posted it as being spot on they reckon the people they know who use it have never seen a fruit fly in their garden, we'll be giving it a try next season.

len

Thanks Len. Yes, I checked out your remedies, I frequently do in fact. I'll be moving to an area that doesn't have FF but it's handy to have repertoire of control measures. You never know, I might end up moving yet again.

I'm almost glad everyone else is having problems with fruit fly this year! They have been HORRIBLE here. We now bag our stone fruit every year (bags from Greenharvest) and this works very well if we bag very bloody early. This year fruit fly made a mess of the cherry plums, which are normally too early, had a jolly fine time with the mortgage lifter tomatoes, liked Green Zebra quite well, and weren't so keen on Black Russian, but made a mess anyway. They are now all over the cherry toms, attacking the figs (unheard of in previous years) and setting up to overwinter in the Ruby grapefruit. I caught one the other day, sinking her bottom into a fig. Squashing her was very cathartic.
Danielle

I wasn't going to reply to this as I'm so p'd off with fruit flies but I had been thinking about bagging my tom flowers to save seed & thought maybe I could use the fruit fly exclusion bags I bought for the stone fruit a couple of years ago. Naturally my next thought was that I might as well leave them on all season. It would be pretty labourious but I've not had Len's success with traps so it may be the way to go.
I'm hoping that a later crop will be less affected so am putting in quite a few plants.

g'day danielle & sarah,

wow danielle attacking the cherry tomatoes never had that problem to date, must be a lot of fruit trees in your area that aren't being managed and harbouring lots of fly. you are welcome to check my remedies page for some fruit fly remedies.

sarah the traps will work it's all to do with the placement, i use 2ltr clear plastic soft drink bottles so i can monitor the kill rate and monitor if a trap(s) is working if it is known that there are flies around. if a trap isn't attracting flies in a few days move it to somewhere else, but not in among your fruit trees or tomatoes etc.,.

remember all damaged fruit must be destroyed don't bury it or compost it, feeding to chooks is best nearly every garden has space for a chook or 2 and free eggs to boot.

len

mail len

lens garden page

Len about the neglected fruit trees, I live just down the road from the UWS Richmond campus. My Ag teacher did his degree there a few years back and as part of his thesis monitored fruit flies to determine where the source of infection for their orchards was coming from.
What did he find?
That the Ag College had a higher population than anywhere else in the district, it turned out they were infecting everyone else, not the other way around!
Danielle & I live quite close to each other in a market garden/orcharding area, I think to be able to grow fruit we need to employ all the techniques you use, plus we need a physical barrier as well.
I tried pyrethrin spray this year, I had no stone fruit & have been really careful with cleaning up & feeding the chooks with fallen fruit. I shall be using more traps next year I think & see if that helps.

good one sarah,

the college was the culprit, bet that surprised them?

in our case here we had no fruit fly at all when we first got crops as there had never been any fruit trees growing here, but by the second season the f/f had found us. so can only assume that they came from neglected trees or in fruit we had bought, then you don't tend to find f/f in shop bought fruit.

len

Jeez, this desert I live in has its good points eh, no FF. The birds are starting to attack my toms but only because they have finished off the grapes. Got one cat that hangs out in my tommy patch all day, dopey cat that one. Got another cat going under the knife on Friday so she can be an outside puss. Hopefully she will have a better kill rate.
Cant really blame the other cat as she has had rickets when a kitten, ate snail pellets and had convulsions for two days, and then was bitten by a brown snake and spent two days at the vets. Her eyes are sunken about half an inch into her head and to say she has an empty look about her is a gross understatement.

Mantis

That one year grace period Len mentioned is pretty typical of many pests. I think the Food Location Noticeboard only gets updated once a year!

BTW, the latest update says something about Horsham and virgin territory!!

Not to many virgins here Ray :-)

Think i may have mentioned it once before some time back???, about n old couple living not too far from here who grow vegies and never have problemo's with Fruit Fly or so they say??, n what they do is get these little plastic bottles n halfe or near enough 1/3rd fill em with Deiso with a couple of wicks protruding outside either side of the bottles 2/3rds of the way up the bottle..
They reckons the smell or whatever is supposed ta keep the beggars at bay??..
Been meaning to try it meself but havent gotten around tuit yet..
Here's one for yez???
Anyone ever seen a round tuit before???.
Mate of mine had one here some time back, interesting:)..
Cheers

Good one Peter!!!

I no longer wish to discuss fruit fly or tomatoes! Spent quality gardening time yesterday clearing out fly-blown cherry toms. Oh the smell!!!! And the waste!!!! No pickled cherry toms for me. Boo hiss and much swearing. Any tips on getting THAT smell from your hands? Did get me out of cooking dinner, though, lol
D

D,
I also found my last lot of red cherry toamtoes were infected. However, I am yet to find a Dr Carolyn, a delicious yellow cherry tomato, that has been hit by FF. In fact, very few of the yellow and green tomatoes have been infected. Food for thought.

Also, I found a fruit fly in the kitchen that had hatched from a tomato on the bench. A lot of fruits I bring in show no signs of being infected, but then a hole appears in the top portion near the stem and next thing you know they become infected.

So I was wondering whether (a) the worms jump ship, (b) if the tiny black flies known to me only as sandwich flies that are hovering in the area are getting into the tomatoes, and (c) that maybe the period between eggs being laid and maggots appearing is quite long and I should eat the fruit before it gets really ripe and the wriggly white gents appear. More food for thought.

However, not as bad as Mrs Grub swigging on an instant coffee on Saturday morning only to spit out a large cockroach that had been boiled in the kettle and inadvertently poured into her cup.

Thanks for that, Grub. I WAS eating!
D

FF maggots can and do change house. Fruit together in a bowl will quickly be sampled by the little buggers burrowing out of one then into its neighbour!

Right then. Isolation for any fruit with those telltale sting marks.

Today's useless info: Those little flies in the fruit bowl (presume this is what you mean by sandwich flies) are Drosophila melanogasta. They hang around ripe bananas in plague proportions. They don't eat much, and won't get into fruit unless its quite past its best or has holes in it. We used to use them for population genetics experiments and they still give me nightmares - not because they are scarey, just bloody tedious: red eyes, vermillion eyes; hairy legs, smooth legs; curly hair, straight hair...... They only have four chromosomes, are not very highly evolved and breed very quickly. We used to grow them up on a yeast substrate which smelled like rotten bananas.

The period between infection and hatching is quite long, as seen on our peach tree. The fruit was bagged very early and harvested weeks latter. Some flies were found dead in the bag, but most were still at the wriggling stage. The lavae can also over-winter in the ground. Maybe their metamorphasis to adult stage is temperature regulated? If so, hatching might be faster at the end of the season?
D

D, that's great info. You've effectively eliminated one suspect, Mr Drosophila melanogasta, the small black that loiters w/ intent. Ta.

Yes, we used those little blighters at school when learning genetics. Easy to collect, jush mash some banana and wait. They're pretty harmless though.

Glancing through a permaculture book the other day, I noticed an interesting tidbit about FF and tomatoes. The author lives in northern NSW and when she first planted out the garden, had terrible FF problems and all but gave up growing tomatoes. She doggedly kept planting a few though each year and she noticed that after her garden had been established for about 5 years, the incidence of FF attck started to decline to the point that now, only a few of her fruit are stung each year. She was honest enough to say that she has no idea why and doesn't even know if it's permanent.

She speculates that it's because she has a very diverse garden now with lots of bird and insect attracting trees, bushes, flowers, herbs and so on and suspects that there may well be FF predators that have now firmly established themselves in her garden.

I'm inclined to believe she's right. Up until last year, I had always grown veggies, herbs and flowers all jumbled up together. I had very few pest problems. Last year I gave over most of my garden, and even reclaimed some of the pool area, to plant tomatoes. They were devestated by pests and disease. Coincidence? Maybe, but I suspect not.

I think diversity is the key. Herbs, veggis, flowers, fruit, berries, shrubs, etc. all in a big jungle. Maybe that's where companion planting came from?

Yeh, I blame Finbar for the lack of diversity in my patch.

Meantime, this thread got a mention ;)

See http://www.smh.com.au/news/Sites/Back-to-earth/2005/03/17/1110913718480.html

Nice plug for GardenWeb. Apparently Spike has sold GardenWeb to a much larger concern, though he/she still runs it. I guess that means more advertising. I don't care as long as it stays free.

Can anyone tell me where and what the "Horsham Virgin territory" mention about FF was? I am near Horsham and DON'T want FF as well as the other bugs I contend with!

Yeh, I read about the change of ownership. IMHO, I really can't see a resource like this staying free forever. Those wheels, that machine, has to keep turning faster and faster. Gobble, gobble, gobble. I hope I'm wrong.

Meantime, I've been finding fruit flies on my kitchen ceiling. Must have hatched from fruit I brought inside.

Thought I should share a nice piece of garden-related yuck with you lot cos you are the only ones who will really appreciate it! Was madly planting up a bed in the vegie patch on Sunday and was about to spread some lucerne from a bag I had started on a few weeks ago. On the top was a bird eaten fig. Inside the bag were millions (well maybe a hundred) big, fat wriggly maggots. You can well imagine the yuck and swearing. "Just throw it out" says my husband. "Not bloody likely", says I who has waited years for lucerne instead of bloody sugar cane which makes me wheeze. Wishing all the while for some helpful chooks, I filled two big buckets with very hot water and soaked as much lucerne as would fit in the buckets. Of course, I had to inspect it a few times to make sure that the maggots were suffering adequately. Tipped it off yesterday when cool and started again. I have saved the bale, killed many, many bloody flies and feel quite pleased with myself. As an added bonus, the stench of festering lucerne in hot water was so foul that I got the vegie patch all to myself - mother's little helper decided dad was a better bet. Also got out of cooking dinner again!!!

That fig tree has got to go! I don't even like figs.
D