I may put a little ACV in the mix next year.
The dude at Miracle farms uses nothing but molasses and water.
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. He found the magic solution that works for him. Different locations may take different formulas. If it works for him, it does its job.
Did he say anything about when to put that mixture out in the orchard?
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@MikeC … I watched the whole video again… did not hear him mention exactly when to put them out… but he hangs a few traps during the vid… and the apple trees were in bloom.
Here not long after apple fruit set… the bugs start messing them up… i mean dime sized.
I put mine on my Novamac when it was blooming and before fruit set.
I refilled my container once… about half way between early to mid April and early August when they ripened.
The 50/50 mix of molasses and water evaporates some and concentrates… over time. I tried to keep my containers at least 40% full.
TNHunter
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Thank you for the great info. It really helps.
The thing about insect and other pest pressure where I am in the northeast is that it varies tremendously year to year, and is as variable as the weather. It would be nice if raspberries had the power to repel your pests and I really hope they do- but I’m pretty skeptical. AFM and CM are quite common as pests and raspberries are very common as fruiting brambles, often planted next to fruit trees early in the establishment of orchards to utilize the extra space. If raspberries have a strong ability to repel such common pests I would expect the correlation to be well known.
I realize that you are not endorsing your method, and are only reaching out to see if others have had a similar experience.
Here is what Chat says on the subject. “Some plants can have a role in companion planting, acting as trap crops or repelling certain pests through volatile compounds, but raspberries have not been documented to perform this function against these specific pests.”
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I should add that, to me, it seems more likely that your socks are repelling these pests as most of the fruit is protected so the insects fly elsewhere being unable to easily differentiate between the protected majority from the unprotected minority.
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Ah, hah! I always wondered where the codling-moth molasses trap idea originated. There’s no official source … apparently.
Dried sunflower stalks from previous year have been studied to house parasitic wasps. Maybe they also like dried raspberry stalks? Maybe even high stems correlate to some predatory housing, idk what bio controls match up for the specific pests, but this is a possibility.
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This has nothing to do with codling moth, but reading about it did remind me of a discovery I made many years ago. My roses always had a ton of aphids. I’d either put on gloves and pull them off, or I would use a strong water spray to get rid of them, but they’d be back very quickly. Then one year I planted a hops vine next to them. On the roses I would see lady bugs eating the aphids, but then they would disappear later in the season. But when I planted the hops vine, I discovered that it was COVERED with lady bugs, and the season for them was much longer. After that, my roses did not have a single aphid. The hops vine stopped having so many lady bugs, it just had a few, but the roses were still aphid free.
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I don’t have problems with either pest you mention, but I often lose a lot of fruit when squirrels go after the young fruit. I have a peach tree that was cleaned out in one 24 hour period. But I see it is being infiltrated by very vigorous black raspberry canes, which I plant to leave next year. Perhaps the thorny tangle will help. On my pear trees I coated the fruit with hot chili oil as an experiment and that stopped the bigger pests.
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