The attack of the Fruit Fly

 The first fruit is allready visible and so far the setting looks great.  It seems as if we did have a warmer and drier August and it the warmer weather really hit us in the mid of September.  This is also what the long term forecast for the Southern Cape predicts.  To look more into the future it seems that the months of September and October will be drier than usual with the chance of only 80% of the normal rainfall. 
The weather will change in November with the rainfall being 120% of the normal.  This means problems especially for the fruit farmers and these days the onion seed growers. 

With more rainfall comes higher possibilities of fungi growth and insect counts.  Talking about the six legged creatures: Do you also find that the mosquitoes are more active earlier this year.  I was surprised to also find the first fruit fly in my plum orchard.  This is a menace to the local farming community and we really want to encourage the people in town with the one and two fruit tree gardens to help us in this battle. 

The last few years it seems as if the numbers of the fruit flies really took off.  There is a few possibilities but the two most common is also the most expensive.  In the Boland / De Doorns areas where the table grapes and fresh fruit production is huge the release infertile males which leads to females being not fertilized and thus less fruit flies being born.  This is an very expensive exercise. 

The best option is probably the second one.  Spraying.  Hire and aeroplane and spray the whole town.  This is a practice done in the Americas with great succes and can easily be applied here.  It still stay very expensive and spraying residue will be in the air for some time.  It is not harmfull and very safe. Again it is expensive. 

Now you ask what can I do to keep these menaces out of my town garden to help myself getting better fruit and keeping the population of fruit flies down for my farming neighbour.  There is two possilities.

1.  Spray a product with active ingredient Mercaptithion at least once every week.  You can put it in any open container add some water according to the dosage on the bottle and add some sugar (the one which you put into your coffee).  This will draw the fruit fly to the poison and the kill it.  The Mercaptithion will break up very easily in direct sunlight so this must be done weekly so that you keep the population down.   You can start as early as October.

2.  Some of the older farmer do have a other solution.  You take a two litre plastic  bottle like a coke or the other famous beverage in town which bottles are distributed everywhere in town.  Cut a few holes in the bottle in the top part.  Keep the bottom intact.  In it you pour some Parafin or Lamp Oil with water and hang this container in the fruit trees in your garden.  This mixture you can replace every two to three weeks.  You will find a lot of our insect friends in there. 

I want to take the opportunity to really ask all the town small holding farmers to take trouble in this fight against the six legged organisms.  They don't contribute anything to our fruit industry and really create a big problem especially to the late season cultivar fruits.