Peach-Tree Growers Can Wage Borer War

If you grow peaches, peach-tree borers may be weakening your tree, or even be preparing to kill it. This insect also attacks--but with less vengeance--plums, apricots and cherries.

Adult female borers spend the summer flying about and looking for trees on which to lay eggs.

These eggs are laid on the bark either just below or a few inches above the soil line, and they hatch into little white “worms” that burrow into the bark.

When cold weather arrives, these worms will take a rest for the winter. Warm weather stirs them again into activity and they begin to feed voraciously.

Symptoms of this borer are masses of gum and sawdust-like “chewings” oozing from the tree near soil level.

Now is the time to deal with this pest before tunneling becomes extensive.

As winter approaches, the worms are only one-eighth or one-half inch long. But by late next spring, many will have grown to be more than 1 inch long, with appetites to match.

Mothballs will kill peach-tree borers.

However, mothballs also can damage trees, so the amount to use must be adjusted to the age of a tree: half an ounce for trees less than 3 years old, three-quarters of an ounce for trees 3 to 6 years old and 1 ounce for older trees. Place a ring of mothballs on the soil at the base of and 1 inch away from the trunk.

Throw enough dirt on top of the mothballs to make a mound to contain the vapors against the trunk. After one month, take down the mound; any borers should be dead.

There are other ways to control borers.

Vigorous trees resist borers, as do those spared bark damage--from lawn mowers, for example. You also can kill borers by digging them out with a knife or shoving a stiff wire into the hole.

Either can do as much damage as a borer, though.

Various remedies of dubious value have been suggested over the years.

These have included whitewash, which will protect the trunk from winter sunburn even if it doesn’t deter borers.

A bar of soap against a trunk drips bitterness after each rain, presumably distasteful to borers. And there’s always garlic, the universal repellent, planted at the base of trees to keep borers, and perhaps vampires, at bay.

However, because peach-tree borers can kill a tree, tried-and-true remedies are the best ones to use.