Controlling fruit flies

Hi,

I have been doing battle with fruit flies for years. Sometimes it seems like a losing battle. This year, I didn't have time set out traps for the olive fruit flies. I didn't even manage to harvest the olives in time, so there are bound to be many fruit flies next year.

Just as a reminder, their life-cycle is as follows:

- Fruit flies lay eggs on fruit
- Maggots hedge from the eggs and start to eat through the fruit
- The maggots leave the fruit and drop on the ground
- The maggots turn into pupae in the ground
- New fruit flies hedge from the pupae 1, 2 or 3 years later

The trick is to cut the cycle at some stage in the cycle. As I said, I failed to harvest the fruit and the maggots have already entered the soil. One recommendation is to turn the soil so the maggots and/or pupae end up too deep in the soil for them to get back to the surface. But in most cases deep plowing is not possible because of the roots or for some other reasons.

The flies will hedge next year between April and October. I was wondering about covering the soil beneath the trees with plastic sheeting to prevent the flies from escaping during that period. But I don't like the idea of all that plastic in the garden, which is difficult to retrieve if it starts to disintegrate due to UV radiation.

So, I was thinking about using a layer of organic matter to seal the soil. Would a compacted thick layer of leaves prevent the flies from getting through?

Cheers,
Dieter

In Australia we have traps, which only trap males.
When you see the males a different set up is used to trap the females, sounds wiered but there is a reason, I will find it again.
Here is the information

1. Monitor for fruit fly activity.
Using fruit fly traps with an attractant (pheromone) in your backyard and checking it daily will let you know whether fruit flies are active in your area and when they have first emerged after winter. Male fruit flies are strongly attracted to these pheromones and this will then alert you when to use other control methods. With experience you will also learn when fruit flies are active in your region.

These traps are long-lasting, but while they do capture some male fruit flies, they will not remove the egg laying females. They need to be used as part of a broader strategy.

And this is the site I drew it from controlling-fruit-fly/gardeners/choosing-a-control-strategy/

Combining function solution is to keep chickens under the trees.   Having laying hens in a tractor pen that you can move around under the trees concentrates their digging for the pupa. It works very well in my orchard. They will also clean up fallen fruit posibly preventing the larva from entering the ground.  I supplement there feed with  whole wheat and some gets dug in and produces a winter cover crop and additional feed the next summer.

Hans Quistorff wrote:Combining function solution is to keep chickens under the trees.

I have actually built a chicken tractor for exactly that purpose; however, I think there will be so many olive fruit flies next year that the chickens are likely to miss a lot. There is also the problem that the ground is uneven around most of the olive trees, which makes it impossible to move the chicken tractor there.

So, I'm still planning on covering the ground beneath the trees with some sort of impenetrable material, ideally organic, so that I don't have to retrieve it afterwards.

I'm waiting until the Spring to get the chicken because I suppose that Winter isn't an ideal time to get started with young chicken. It seldom freezes where I live, but it can get quite cold at night.

Cheers,
Dieter