Applying Grease Bands To Fruit Trees (Video)

How to Apply Grease Bands to Younger Trees

If you apply grease bands to your young fruit trees, it will help prevent winter moths laying their eggs. When these hatch, the caterpillars eat the leaves and fruit.

You will need grease bands and a younger fruit tree with smooth bark.

TRANSCRIPT

Right, so we're going to put a grease band on a younger tree. The reason we use grease bands on younger trees is because the bark is usually smoother. We can wrap these fairly tight and we'll get quite a few more trees done with one grease band as they're fairly young. And the bark is a lot smoother. So we’ll be able to secure it down.

The reason why we don’t apply grease bands to larger trees, is because the bark is usually a lot more fissured and the moths, earwigs, ants, whatever can crawl underneath the grease band through the fissures and up the other side.

So, get your grease bands from the website at Ashridge Nurseries.

Everything you need is in the box. It contains the grease band and some wire as well. So basically, it’s just a roll of grease.

Cut where you need to go. So from there to there. So we'll just cut that piece off. The grease band we’ve got for there. So I'll just roll that back up, putting it in your bag, so it doesn’t dry out.

So you’ve measured your grease band. There’s two ends. You've got the grease in the middle and you've got two ends you can hold on to. Leave the grease on the outside - sticky side out. Go about one foot up the tree trunk, put your grease band on, you might have to fold the ends over so it sticks. Cut yourself a couple of bits of the wire and twist it round to secure it and snip it off.

All right, when you’ve got grease band on, the moths will kind of try and climb up here and will make it over there and then get stuck in this middle part here. You put these on in the Autumn or in the winter, so we're in November now. Once you get to the spring, you'll see some bugs getting stuck in the grease band and you know it's doing its job.