Spring: everything wakes up. All sorts of creepy crawlies are gunning for your crops and sometimes we need to be ahead of the game. 

Apples have stopped flowering and the smallest beginnings of the fruit are on your trees. 

Those tiny fruitlets are known in English as “Codlings” 

Hence the name for the moth who’s caterpillars love to invade these codlings: Codling moth 

Parents (moths) are now laying eggs on these codlings, so let’s avoid the caterpillars tunnelling into your tiny, developing fruit! 

MADEX is the spray to use from now on; every two weeks or so until February. 

Madex is a codling moth granulosis virus that will affect the small brutes before they enter the apple. Only works on Codling moth species (Cydia pomonella); and the virus will not harm us either. 

Noticed the black sooty mould on your lemon tree leaves? That stuff grows on all sorts of citrus! 

That’s a fungus that grows on the excrement of sap-sucking insects, especially scale insects, mealybugs and citrus whitefly. 

Those tiny whitefly have really become the bigger pest on citrus, especially north of Christchurch. 

Trying to remove the black, sooty mould is literally useless, as the sap-suckers will continue to drop their sweet poos; 

So: we need to control those whitefly etc., right now by giving them a weekly dose of Neem Oil. Aim for the top-side of the leaves and the bottom-side of the leaves. The regularity of spraying halts the egg-laying part of the life cycle, simply by killing the susceptible juveniles before they become adults. 

Lemon tree borer is another troublesome critter on citrus; this one grows its babies (rather large beetle grubs) in tunnels in branches, twigs and trunks of citrus trees. 

The female beetle lays her eggs on freshly-made pruning cuts, so the very first thing we must not do is prune our citrus in spring and summer. 

To remove the grub from its tunnel is tricky, but can be achieved with a “hypodermic needle” filled with insecticide. You can literally squirt that stuff into the grub’s tunnel by access in the “toilet hole” from the outside. 

That way you won’t cause any extra damage to the branch but still halt the destruction inside the branch 

Clever, eh? 

 

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