When a female olive fruit fly lays her eggs in the fruit, the larvae are left to eat their way out of the olive. The tunneled fruit deteriorates quickly, leaving oxidized oil and rotten flesh, not suitable for high-quality oil or cured olive production. "For those of you tending a good crop this season, a proactive pest control program will help ensure high quality oil for you this year and next," says our President Samantha Dorsey. Here are Samantha's 7 tips to help control infestation and maintain a healthy crop throughout the year:
- Keep spraying GF-120, or some product with the active ingredient spinosad. If you are not spraying, keep your traps up and refreshed weekly with water and torula yeast.
- Spray every 7-14 days in the interior of the canopy, in the morning, with a 4:1 water to product ratio. Spray up until harvest – there is no pre-harvest interval with GF-120. Reapply more frequently if it rains.
- Unless you have just a few trees, do not bother harvesting already-infected fruit. It will be expensive and time-consuming with very minimal potential results.
- Sort your fruit carefully when harvesting before you arrive at your mill this year. It is difficult to mill extra virgin oil with fruit that has greater than 10% damage.
- As much as is reasonable, clean up your orchard post-harvest so as not to leave too much overwintering fruit for the flies.
- In the spring, set your traps out as early as April.
- Remind your neighbors with olive trees that any untreated trees host the fly and compound the problem for California’s olive producers.
