Get A Handle On Your Outdoor Fruit Fly Infestation With This Vaseline Hack

Whether you have a couple of fruit trees in your backyard or acres of orchard, you've likely battled fruit flies. These teeny, winged pests seem inoffensive until you encounter their offspring when biting into a juicy apple you nurtured for months. U.S. fruit growers mostly deal with apple maggots (fruit fly larvae) and Suzuki fruit flies. Hawaii has the solanum fruit fly, melon fly, and Medfly, too. (And yes, there's a difference between fruit flies and gnats.) Eradicating insects in the Tephritidae family outdoors is simpler, cheaper, and more eco-friendly than you probably imagined. Craft a sticky trap from a tub of Vaseline or similar off-brand petroleum jelly, a yellow object to smear it on, and something to hang the whole thing with.

Bottle funnel traps with liquid bait are most often recommended and arguably work better for getting rid of fruit flies once and for all. But sticky traps work well enough for most gardeners. Most consist of a sheet of sticky yellow paper with a hook to hang it from a branch. Some, called Ladd traps, feature a red ball in the middle of the card. It's designed to look like a ripe apple and sometimes contains scented bait that increases the trap's effectiveness. Hanging sticky traps early enough, just when the season starts, allows you to monitor the arrival and number of pests and judge when best to apply pesticide (or whether to apply any at all) to protect your growing fruit.