One of the great pleasures of fruit trees is picking ripe fruit right from the tree, and eating it on the spot. Sometimes, if you’re growing cherries, that fruit comes with some extra protein and slimy decaying fruit flesh – yuck! What gives? The western cherry fruit fly (Rhagoletis indifferens) is to blame. These tiny little flies can wreak havoc on a cherry harvest, and they are especially fond of sour cherries. So much for that cherry pie!
This pest hit New Mexico several years ago and has slowly been spreading. They don’t fly far, so the spread is slow, but they are the very dickens to try to get rid of. Newly molted adult flies emerge from the soil in spring, as the cherry fruits are sizing up. The females then lay eggs just under the surface of the fruit. Eggs hatch, and little white maggots start eating their way through the fruit. The tiny tunnels they make are soon colonized by decay bacteria, which turn the fruit into icky goo.
Control is extremely tricky. The adults can be trapped with sticky traps, and the fruit sprayed with spinosad to hopefully kill the adults when they land. The larva, which drop out of the fruit to continue development in the shallow soil under the tree, can be targeted with predatory nematodes. Letting chickens scratch around under the tree is also helpful, if that’s an option. Tarping the soil is another option.
Let Legacy help you solve this problem!
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