Recognising common apple pests without chemical sprays

Walking the orchard with a sharp eye

The best pest control you will ever own is a pair of boots and half an hour of quiet observation. A mature apple tree in a British garden or smallholding can carry a surprising amount of insect life without any real loss of crop, and the trick is learning to tell the difference between a bit of nibbling and a problem that will strip your harvest. Walk your trees once a week from bud burst through to late August, checking leaves, shoot tips, and the small fruitlets in the cluster. Take a notebook. After two seasons you will know your orchard's rhythms far better than any spray schedule could tell you.

What follows are the three pests that cause most of the heartache in English orchards, plus the practical, spray-free ways to keep them in check.

Codling moth: the maggot in the apple

Codling moth is the reason for that disappointing brown tunnel through the core of an otherwise perfect Cox or Bramley. The adult is a small, dusk-grey moth that flies on warm evenings in late May and June, laying single eggs on leaves and young fruit. The damage appears later: a small hole in the skin, often near the calyx or where two apples touch, with reddish-brown frass pushed out. Cut the fruit open and you will find a pinkish caterpillar and a trail of debris.

Trapping is your first line of defence. Hang a pheromone trap in early May and check it weekly — the first catch tells you the moths are flying, so start inspecting fruitlets a fortnight later. From mid-June, go over your trees every few days and pick off any fruit with an entry hole, dropping it into a bucket of water rather than the grass. This breaks the cycle before the caterpillar leaves the apple to pupate in bark crevices.

Two old remedies are worth the effort. Tie a corrugated cardboard band around the trunk in July, roughly 30cm wide, and the full-grown caterpillars will use it as a pupation site. Remove and burn the bands in winter. If you have hens, letting them scratch beneath the trees in autumn and early spring clears a good number of overwintering cocoons in the leaf litter.

Aphids: greenfly, woolly aphid and the curling shoot

Aphids are the first pest most of us learn to recognise. Greenfly cluster on soft new growth and the undersides of leaves, and the tell-tale sign is sticky honeydew, a sooty black mould, and curled, distorted shoot tips. Woolly aphid is a different beast — a greyish-white, cotton-wool-like fluff in the crotches of branches and old pruning wounds, particularly on apple trees with a history of it.

• Check shoot tips from April. A small colony is easy to rub out between finger and thumb.
• Squash lightly infested tips rather than cutting them off; you keep more growth for fruiting spurs.
• Encourage ladybirds, hoverflies and lacewings by leaving a patch of umbellifers — fennel, dill, yarrow — nearby. Their larvae eat aphids in quantity.
• For woolly aphid, scrub the colonies with a stiff brush in winter, then again in early summer, and paint the area with a dilute soap solution.

Ants are the accomplice here: they farm aphids and protect them from predators. A band of grease around the trunk in spring keeps them from climbing and lets the beneficial insects do their work.

Winter moth: the holes in spring

If your young leaves come out riddled with small holes, or the blossom and tiny fruitlets drop in May, winter moth caterpillars are likely the culprit. The wingless females climb the trunk in late autumn to lay eggs in bark crevices; the caterpillars hatch in spring and feed voraciously before dropping to the soil to pupate in early summer. Apples, pears and plums are all fair game.

The classic non-chemical fix is a grease band. Wrap a sticky band around each trunk in mid-October, before the females start climbing, and keep it clear of debris through to December. It must sit tightly against the bark with no gap behind it. Do not forget to remove it once spring arrives, or you will trap beneficial insects and even small birds. Blue tits are superb allies against winter moth; hang a few nest boxes near your trees by February and the parent birds will bring caterpillars back by the beakful all through May.

Building a balanced orchard instead of a battlefield

Nature rarely allows one insect to dominate for long, provided it has somewhere to be eaten. A strip of rough grass and wildflowers beneath the trees gives ground beetles and parasitic wasps somewhere to live. Log piles, a hedge, and a few untidy corners will reward you with more birds, more hoverflies, and fewer outbreaks.

Good tree hygiene matters, too. Rake up fallen leaves under heavily infested trees in autumn, prune out congested branches so air moves freely through the canopy, and feed with well-rotted compost rather than quick nitrogen, which pushes out the soft growth aphids love. If you do decide something must be removed, pick a still, dry evening and drop the material straight into a sealed bag.

Accept a little damage. A few holes and a couple of maggoty windfalls are the price of an orchard humming with life, and in a decent year you will barely notice them among the good fruit. Watch, trap, encourage, and intervene with your hands rather than a bottle — it is slower, but it works, and it is far more satisfying.