Worms in my currant berries

Hi all,

Any one have a good solution for preventing worms in my currants?  Its some kind of fly that lays eggs inside the berries and then they hatch and eat the berry contents.  Rather a nasty surprise when you bite into a nice red current and find a worm.

Sorry, I can't give any advice though I do remember reading this:

Greg said, "in my area, if you let them get very ripe on the plant, mulberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc, will all have some degree of worms in them. fruit flies. they don’t change the flavor any! i will accept the small addition of protein to my berry feast.

https://permies.com/t/162823/Wild-Mulberries-good-true#1276665

It may be spotted wing drosophila (a species of fruit fly recently spreading across N. America). I don't know much about management, but you might look it up by that name and see what research has been done in B.C. for organic fruit growers. Washington State University has also done a fair bit of work with this beast. It is very difficult to manage in larger scale farms, I know that.

Here is a guess based on study I have been doing recently...

The worms are there because the fruit is high in sugars which is obvious. What is not so obvious is that insects will avoid laying eggs in plant material that contains amino acids and proteins because the larvae can't digest them.

Amino acid levels in a plant and the digestibility by insect larvae is a spectrum so you may observe worms in the berries of one plant but very few or none at all in another plant.

The high sugar / low protein situation can be a result of genetics (selected breeding) or an indicator that the plant is deficient in essential nutrients required for protein optimal protein synthesis.

An immediate intervention you can take is to apply a foliar spray containing bioavailable Iron, Manganese, and Silica. These are critical components for optimal photosynthesis and cellular wall construction that are often depleted in the plant even though they are abundant in the soil.

A foliar spray is really an emergency measure to compensate for something systemic that is malfunctioning within your system. In this case there is something going on in your soil that is preventing the necessary microbial activity from converting these essential minerals into bioavailable forms where the plants can absorb them.

There are some general things you can do to improve overall soil web vitality which is covered in detail here at permies. If this was a large scale berry production system, they would typically perform a lab analysis and identify exactly what nutrients are deficient so that they can address it without inhibiting other processes.

To repeat that point, you can make systemic changes to improve overall soil web vitality which results in and even greater plant available nutrient imbalance so on the small scale where paying for lab analysis isn't economical you are going to have to experiment a bit and pay very close attention to how the plants are expressing themselves.