Don’t lose your apple crop to codling moth

Hi now is the time to do battle with codling moths those little creatures that can puncture virtually every apple on your tree, leaving a worm hole, that disfigures and helps cause early rot in the apples.

How do you know if you have codling moth? The characteristics of the damage caused are a tunnel like hole bored through the apple, and at the exit point there is a dusty brown deposit known as frass.

When you eat an apple and discover it has a maggot in it the chances are that maggot is a codling moth caterpillar. The terms caterpillar, larvae, and maggot being interchangeable here, a wriggly crawling thing you don’t want in your apples.

The only way to beat this enemy in the garden is to learn about its sex life. In the winter it will have hibernated away probably around the base of the apple tree somewhere under leaves, bark, or where ever.

As the air warms up in the spring and the early evening temperature begins to rise above 62 degrees Fahrenheit, they pupate from the maggot stage, into a moth. They fly around very briefly for a few hours in the evening, searching for a mate, when they have mated the female then lays her eggs on the tree, twig, leaves, or preferably apples.

These eggs then hatch into caterpillars which head for the nearest apple. They bore into the apple which is their food source then stay there until fully grown. They now crawl out of the apple and drop to the ground where they will pupate into a moth repeating the cycle. The early moth will be responsible for several generations of moth in one season.

The easiest thing to do is set moth traps, these are laced with pheromone that smells like a female moth to a male, so he is off trying to mate with the moth trap, rather than the females. You have to leave the traps out all season as each generation of moths needs to be caught by it. You will need two sachets of pheromone as it only lasts about 8 weeks.

You won’t eradicate codling moth entirely in one season if it is well established, but you should be able to reduce it gradually and after two or three seasons it should be fairly low. 100% is not really achievable but you will be able to get it much lower.

The final thing is hygiene, you need to remove any fallen apples during May or June these can act as reservoirs for the maggots to live on, at the end of the season again any fallen apples should be removed from the area as the maggots will over winter on these.

If necessary you can resort to spraying the trees with insecticide, this is done by professional growers as their incomes depend on it. Being a hobby grower, I prefer to keep my trees as organic as possible.

Insecticides also need to be applied according to the life cycle of the moth. Depending on the type of chemical used and its effectiveness over time you will need to spray several times.

If surrounding trees on neighbouring land has codling moths it will be more difficult to deal with them as they will keep straying onto your trees.

The moths don’t fly far so if you can keep down the moths around your tree, you shouldn’t get to many moths arriving from a long distance away, unless you get particularly strong winds at mating time. The maggots will certainly only crawl a very short distance.

I have researched a few sites on the web and these people give good deals on coddling moth traps:

In the USA: