Olives, weeds and mister Dacus oleae
In the area of the plot where we have the olive trees we also grew many weeds. We never have so many time to cut the weeds from this area because the plot is big for us and the days which spend there not enough.
Olive trees are many in this area, the neighborly plots have olive trees also but they don’t grew them organic. I thought about this many times but at the end I conclude that this is not problem for my trees because we always had problem with Dacus oleae, the olive fruit fly. If their chemicals affected our trees we will not had problems with this fly.
Olive trees make many olives every 2 years. One year is the good year and the other the bad. This year is the bad year for our olives but I decide to make something about this fruit fly and I bought some traps for Dacus oleae. Every trap cost 2 Euro and I bought only 20 for this year because are expensive.
If I see a difference in the olives with these traps, next year I will buy more traps.
Because your neighbors use chemicals, the problem is probably worse for you. The chemicals probably kill any beneficial insects that might be around to eat or kill the olive flies.
I have this problem with blackfly in my garden. I don’t think I will really ever be able to grow broad (fava) beans, because people in other gardens use chemicals against the black fly that in turn kills most of the spiders and ladybugs in my garden.
@Patrick I don’t know if we have some insects for dacus in Greece. As I know in organic olive trees they use only traps here.
But I will search informations about insects for dacus.
See Dacus Traps