Years ago when I lived in SW GA for 10 years, I had good luck with plum curculio with these strategies in my small mixed fruit orchard:
- Intensive chickens.....we were selling eggs most of the time and ran 50-75 hens in about half an acre of trees, fenced in...enough to scratch much of the ground bare. We would throw in truckloads of
mulch of all sorts. No fallen fruit would sit for even an hour.
-Early varieties.....the bugs simply have less time to work on them.
This practice gave me ~75% worm free fruit on the early plums and peaches. Everybody that knew about it was surprised, including the UGA fruit specialist who made a special trip to see it.....