Prevent certain pests from damaging young trees by using physical barriers, pruning, and trunk treatments.
- Paint bark of young trees a light color to prevent sunburn, which provides entry sites for borers.
- Apply Bordeaux mixture or copper barriers to trunks to exclude the brown garden snail.
- Apply barriers of sticky material on young trunks to exclude flightless pests such as earwigs, ants, Fuller rose beetle, and false chinch bug nymphs. For example, certain ants chew bark on young trees while others tend scales and whiteflies, disturbing natural enemies that otherwise biologically control these pests.
- Prune tree skirts as trees mature to prevent access to trees by flightless invertebrates and to reduce movement of fruit rot pathogen spores from soil to fruit.