a question for Donn

[Donn]

This is really not a question for me. I have never heard of this stuff before, but a web search turns up some links, and without going so far as to actually look at the pages, I see for example

A complete liquid fruit tree spray containing Captan 12%, Malathion 6%, Carbaryl .3% and a spreader sticker. Simple to use. No plugged nozzles. As little as 1 ...

I have several fruit trees - peaches, an apple and a quince here on my little lot - and they get along OK without periodic poisoning. The worst problem of late is that the one peach that isn't self fertile, also came into bloom early when there weren't many peaches in bloom and the bees were too cold and wet to do much, so no fruit on that very healthy looking young tree this year. I believe if I spent 10 minutes out there this morning, now that it's warmer, I'd be able to count a half dozen small wild bee species, a couple species of bumblebees, and quite a few honeybees, and I think that means that my neighbors are leaving the insecticides on the shelves too, so all I need is a little later blooming schedule from that tree.

If I'm looking at the wrong fruit tree spray there and there's one that really does work by waxing the tree, I'm still a little stumped because while we have a small area of linoleum floor, we don't wax it, so have no idea what that stuff could be. Alas, not much help here.

[Three Valves]

Are you saying Juicy Fruit Gum is flavored with floor wax??

[Uncle Buck]

I'm not Donn, and I'm not really answering the question, but . . .

I've got two cherry trees and an apple tree in my backyard. The only bugs I've had trouble with is aphids. And I get those BAD. They will completely take over my cherry trees (then eventually the entire backyard) if I don't do something about them.

I wanted to avoid spraying chemicals, so I first started trying to fight them just with ladybugs (which eat aphids). Worked OK, but got expensive unless I wanted to get into the ladybug farming business, which I didn't want to do.

Coupla years ago I started using a home-brew spray that I had read about. It has three ingredients: Olive oil (the cheapest I can find - Costco sells big bottles of "light" olive oil that work), plain yellow lemon dish soap, and water.

So far, it has worked great. It controls the aphids better than the ladybugs did. I have to wait for the aphids to actually show up - it doesn't work as a prevention. If I spray at the first sign of them, the mixture seems to wipe them out. From what I've read, it suffocates them.

Beyond that, my next problem is birds. Haven't figured that one out yet. Reflective (metallic) strips tied onto tree branches helps a bit, but to me (and to my neighbors) they look silly. I've been thinking of buying a decoy owl that's supposed to scare away birds, but haven't done that yet.

[Donn]

Interesting spray idea.

Ladybugs are an aphid predator for sure, but the adults only eat so many and concentrate on making more ladybugs, and it sounds like they're flying off and doing that somewhere else. I would expect it to pay off only when you're basically re-introducing a long term population. Even then there's a limit to what you can expect with one predator species and one pest species. The pests tend to be more prolific, population builds up, eventually the predator population catches up and wipes them out, but then the predator starves and the cycle starts again. I get some aphids on things, but not much, and I don't really know who to thank. There are a lot of little birds, and I expect paper wasps would eat aphids too. We have a lot of syrphid flies, bee-like flies with a distinctive hovering flight style, and their larva is a sort of aphid-eating maggot. Some aphids, some lacewings ... but no one of those predators could do it alone, and even then there are some failures. Gooseberries are out because of a specific pest fly whose larvae eat the leaves. Paper wasps could control the population, but then they'd lose interest when the maggots were all gone, the maggots would bounce back and eat all the leaves before the paper wasps caught on.

Birds tend to be a lot more cautious when there are Coopers hawks around.