INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT
Nylon Footies: Excellent Insect Barrier Ted Swensen The results are in; Nylon Footies are 100% effective against apple maggots & 96-98% effective against coddling moths. The environmentally effective way to protect your fruit without spraying is easy to apply. The key to the effective barrier is time of application. Nylon Footies must be applied BEFORE the codling moth emerges in early spring. Apple maggot fruit fly emerges after the codling moth.

Easy to Apply

I was an advocate of paper bagging fruit. I now advocate use of nylon footies because they are just as effective but much easier to apply. I apply the footie when fruit thinning for apples within 40 days of petal fall to help eliminate alternate bearing by sliding the footie over my little finger and bunching the nylon so that at least half of the length of the footie slides up the fruit. I make sure the top of the nylon covers the stem. That's it, no tying the nylon to the fruit stem or branch. Footies also work well on short fruit stemmed varieties, whereas, paper bags do not. When thinning fruit, it is the general rule not to have two fruits on one spur because they will touch each other. If two fruits touch each other most of the time the coddling moth larva will enter where they touch. I placed nylon footies on 6 pairs of fruit that touched each other to see if they would become wormy. Results: not one of the six pairs of fruit had coddling moth or apple maggot.

Re-useable?

Nylon Footies stretch as the fruit grows. When removed from the fruit it is still stretched. One HOS member has washed stretched nylon footies and said they shrunk to their original size. I have hand washed about 200 used nylon footies and dried them is a dryer and all shrunk but a few (>5%) still had a slightly larger opening than non-used nylon Footies. It appears and we will know next season if they will stay on the fruit.

Cost

HOS is now selling them on this website. See the Fruit Footies page for details. http://www.homeorchardsociety.org/article/47/
CARNIVOROUS PLANTS
Carnivorous plants (sometimes called insectivorous plants) are plants that derive some or most of their nutrients (but not energy) from trapping and consuming animals or protozoans, typically insects and other arthropods. Carnivorous plants appear adapted to grow in places where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as acidic bogs and rock outcroppings. Charles Darwin wrote the first well-known treatise on carnivorous plants in 1875.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivorous_plants
The butterworts are a group of carnivorous plants comprising the genus Pinguicula. Members of this genus use sticky, glandular leaves to lure, trap, and digest insects in order to supplement the poor mineral nutrition they obtain from the environments. Of the roughly 80 currently known species, 12 are native to Europe, 9 to North America, and the rest are found in northern Asia, South and Central America and southern Mexico. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinguicula

Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), box is filled with 2 Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), 1 Octopus Plant (Drosera species), and 1 Starfish plant (Pinguicula sp.).http://plantsforkids.com/venusflytrap.html





TRAP TYPE: Flypaper Trap - Drosera (sundew)
Currently Ca. 152 listed species occupying temperate and tropical habitats throughout the world. The master of sticky fly paper, Drosera (sundew), is a slow trap compared to the one in Venus Flytrap. However, the sundew relies on first trapping its prey with its sticky, glandular hairs, as shown in Figure 1, before it slowly rolls up the edges of the leaf. It does not fold like the Venus fly trap, but it can effective enclose small flies with the numerous hairs. The sundews, so named because their glandular leaf hairs glisten like dew in the sun, are not only common in bogs, but can occur on sandy banks and other mineral soils poor in organic nitrogen and phosphorus. So fascinating is this tiny plant that Darwin (1875) spent 285 pages of his book on insectivorous plants describing his own experiments on it. The hairs are stalked glands (Figure 3, 4 & 5) and produce digestive juices that decompose the trapped prey. These digestive enzymes, including protease and phosphatase, increase in production once a prey has been captured, reaching maximum concentration about the fourth day. Although one sundew is hardly an effective means of eliminating insect pests, Oliver (in Heslop-Harrison, 1978) counted insects trapped in a sampling of plants in England and estimated that about six million insects were trapped in a bog of about two acres! http://www.botany.org/carnivorous_plants/drosera.php Darlingtonia californica (pronounced /dɑːɹlɪŋtoʊniːə kælɪfɔːɹnɪkə/), also called the California Pitcher plant, Cobra Lily, or Cobra Plant, is a carnivorous plant, the sole member of the genus Darlingtonia in the family Sarraceniaceae. It is native to Northern California and Oregon, growing in bogs and seeps with cold running water. This plant is designated as uncommon due to its rarity in the field.[1] The cobra lily is unique among the three genera of American pitcher plants in two ways. First, it does not trap rainwater in its pitcher. Instead, it regulates the level of water inside manually by releasing or absorbing water into the trap that has been pumped up from the roots. Second, unlike some other pitcher-plants, its leaves don't produce any digestive enzymes. The cells that absorb nutrients from the inside of the pitcher are the same as those on the roots that absorb soil nutrients. Instead, the California pitcher plant relies on symbiotic bacteria and protozoa to break down the captured insects into easily absorbed nutrients. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlingtonia_californica Rapid plant movement encompasses movement in plant structures occurring over a very short period of time, usually under one second. For example, the Venus Flytrap closes its trap in about 100 milliseconds.[1] The Dogwood Bunchberry's flower opens its petals and fires pollen in less than 0.5 milliseconds. The record is currently held by the White Mulberry tree, with flower movement taking 25 μs, moving petals to velocities in excess of half the speed of sound- near the theoretical physical limits for movements in plants.[2] These rapid plant movements differ from the more common, but much slower "growth-movements" of plants, called tropisms. Charles Darwin in 1880 published his last work before his death, The Power of Movement in Plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_plant_movement