How to keep late-summer wasps off our precious fruits using natural methods
Wasps are a gardener’s ally early in the year and incredibly useful predators and pollinators feeding countless insects to their young, and helping our crops grow forth. But as colonies mature the need for fresh meat reduces and they want more sugary fuel. Thus wasps seldom bother our strawberries and early ripening fruits, but later in the season can make a beeline for our apples and plums.
It’s a tricky conundrum as we need wasps next year, yet we also want to be able to harvest our lovely home grown fruits as well. What is an organic gardener to do?
Front line fruit protection
Netting is the answer, physically kept off by fine mesh net (re-purposed nylon net curtains are free). Ideally, this netting is sown into bags and slipped over branches, or completely over small bushes, or simply held in place with clothes pegs – though do be aware wasps can be persistent and try to find any gap.
Very possibly, my greatest ever re-purposing triumph was after a wedding when I received some small tokens in an organza gift bag with a drawstring. These are so brilliant! Paper bags get wet and allow no airflow, a plastic bag gets steamy and causes rot, nylon is okay but clings, but organza is slightly stiff so the bag stands proud and allows plentiful airflow while completely stopping all wasps as well as flies of any size.
They are easy to slip on and off, and washable, so I bought a load of small ones for individual fruits, plus medium and really large ones for big bunches of grapes and so on. There’s little I’ve ever found as effective as these bags (sadly I don’t own shares in their manufacture!).
Anyway, though we may net or bag our most valuable fruits we can hardly manage large heavily laden bushes and trees. The solution is to stop wasps finding them. You see colonies daily send scouts on patrol, those single wasps you see scoping out every corner. They sample and find the sweetest fruits (or jam etc) and go home to bring their army. So if we out fox the scouts, there will be no army.
The perfect ethical wasp deterrent
In the old days we used to get rid of wasps using jammy jars – jam jars with a little jam inside and water in the bottom. They were fitted with aluminium foil lids with pencil-thick holes, so the wasps could get in but not out. However, these days we recognise how important wasps are in helping maintain the natural balance of the environment, so instead of such measures, how about investing instead in gentler but more preventive, effective measures such as the brilliantly named Waspinator!
Available in garden centres and online, these are decoy wasp ‘nests’ that you hang in the garden, or over your outside eating area. They fool local wasps into thinking there’s already a colony in residence, so they beat a retreat!
Ingenious! And remember – never swat at wasps because they’ll generally ignore you if you leave them be. Annoy them however, and you may pay a painful price.
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