Painting the bottom of your orchard trees with white latex paint can help prevent crawling insects from climbing up your tree

Visitors to Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard will notice that our young fruit trees look like they are wearing pretty white Sunday socks. That’s because our head gardener and favourite local artist Sherry Firing painted the bottom of our fruit trees with white latex paint.

The painted trunks makes our trees look cute, but there’s more to it than that. As it turns out, ants and other insects don’t like crawling on smooth white paint. They also don’t like the glare of white so if you were thinking of painting rainbow colours in your own orchard, don’t expect it to work as efficiently.

This is just one tip that we learned in our recent workshop on Integrated Pest Management led by Growing for Green Coordinator Susan Poizner, and articling agrologist and integrated pest management expert, Ray Martinez. The workshop was part of the Ryerson Urban Agriculture Summit on August 15 – 18, 2012 and it took place in the fantastic orchard of the North York Community House on Lotherton Pathway, who, along with GreenHere partnered with us for the event.

The workshop included a class component in which Susan and Ray showed a slideshow to help participants identify various pests and diseases such as fireblight, black knot, apple maggots and more. And the instructors introduced organic ways to tackle those common problems through pruning, organic sprays, and other simple and environmentally friendly methods.

Afterwards, students went hunting for signs of any disease in the the North York Community House’s wonderful orchard, which consists of 75 fruit trees. They identified any problems that they found and talked about how to deal with them.

It was a great day and the event attracted 14 participants. Susan and Ray will be running similar workshops for other orchard communities around the city to empower others to be able to identify and treat disease. To have them do a workshop for your group you can send an email to susanpoizner at gmail dot com.

The most important lesson the group learned? It was that fruit trees are like kids – you don’t throw them away if they have a cold or the stomach flu! You find gentle and effective ways to treat them so that they will thrive again soon.

Ray Martinez (right) at Growing for Green’s Workshop on combatting pests and disease in fruit trees