鈥淪andwich bags don鈥檛 grow on trees,鈥� my friend鈥檚 mother would have said.

So if you happen to see a bunch of sandwich bags on my apple trees, they鈥檙e not actually growing there.

We鈥檝e always had a few wormy apples every year. Usually there鈥檇 be a bug or two that would get past the dormant spray and plant a few worms in the apples.

It meant a few spoiled apples, but most of the damage could be cut out and the bulk of the apple salvaged for juice or sauce鈥� until the year half the apples were completely worm-eaten.

I hadn鈥檛 seen that before. Instead of a single bore-hole into the core of the apple, the entire flesh was darkened by a miniature rat鈥檚 warren. Apples that seemed perfect upon picking succumbed to the extensive mine-works during storage.

I dusted off my old books and found that the only likely culprit wasn鈥檛 likely at all 鈥� it didn鈥檛 live around here.

But they were my old agricultural science books from the 1970s.

Widening my search, I discovered that the apple maggot fly had widened its territory to include the Fraser Valley just a few years ago.

It鈥檚 a miserable little beast, and hard to control. I destroyed all the infected apples and was more diligent in my dormant spray program. I carefully used a relatively benign spring spray, timed to cause minimum damage to bees and our resident pest control squad 鈥� predatory insects and birds.

It seemed to work: more edible apples, fewer tunnels.

But the following year, it wasn鈥檛 enough. So I added organic-garden-approved sticky traps鈥� and caught a young chickadee. The traps came down and the apples went to hell.

Last year, I tried hormone traps. The pheromones are supposed to attract the maggot flies.

It worked. I鈥檓 sure they attracted every maggot within their half-kilometre forage area.

And I did not have a single edible apple.

So this year I have about 200 sandwich bags hanging in my apple trees, each one surrounding a baby apple which I hope will grow up worm-free.

The effort has been similar so far as I鈥檝e put in low-impact spraying and catching and hand-picking the deleterious bugs in past years, and the bags are far less expensive.

It鈥檚 supposed to work. I鈥檒l let you know.

Sandwich bags don鈥檛 grow on trees, but I鈥檓 hoping my apples will.