Cherry Fruit Fly Monitoring Traps
Cherry fruit flies are responsible for those disgusting white maggots you find inside both sweet and pie cherries. Yuck.
To be effective at controlling the fruit flies, you need to know when they’re active in the area. To do this, purchase and hang a cherry fruit fly monitoring trap in or near your cherry tree(s).
You’ll notice it’s a bright yellow, which is a color that attracts the fruit flies. That’s because it’s the same color of a ripening cherry, and that’s what they want to lay their eggs in. The traps are coated with a sticky substance that the flies get stuck on.
You can find the monitoring traps at a large, well-stocked garden center (try Northwest Seed & Pet in the Spokane area) and they are fairly inexpensive.
Once you notice the cherry fruit flies on the trap (other types of flying insects can get caught on them as well), you need to act!
For more information on growing cherries organically, refer to my blog post on Final Organic Cherry Production Report.