North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Gianni" <GIANNI-2@prodigy.net>]

Gang:

Well here is the story...my "late peach" tree was loaded with large, 
beautiful, succulent looking peaches...the only problem is as the 
peaches ripen, little tiny red ants attack them and burrow through the 
flesh...I am so sad...I wiped a bunch of ants off of one and sampled 
the fruit and my gosh...it was incredible...what an ambrosiatic(yes I 
created a word)experience...but here is the sad part, the ants forced 
me to pick the peaches in a less then fully ripe state, and frankly I 
can taste a tremendous difference between the tree ripe ones and the 
still kind of hard ones...so the question is, how do you handle 
this???   

Sad, sad, so very sad...

Fluf

Fluffster... Please don't fret oh furry one. Here try this...

Because I mulch my prunus persica, the ants love to take shelter in the mulch.
I reverse ship tape around the trunk and they walk through it and get adhered
to the tape. This should within a day or two dramatically reduce the ant 
population.
The clear tape also warms the trunk a bit.... Will catch earwick, beetles, 
flies, ants
a whole myriad. Works real nice on anything that comes in contact with the 
adhesive. 
I use a very strong tape that has the stickiness of duct tape.
Early in the season for a few weeks I will constantly keep changing the tape 
as it fills 
with expired ants and completely wipes out the population. And then again in 
late summer.
Hope this is a quick stopgap of some sort so you can try to get these to 
fully ripening. 

Ambrosiatic. Hee hee.

Best of growing,
~Gianni










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