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My orchard is located about 20 yards from the house. This is the ideal distance for anyone in my opinion. Too close, and it’s too short a trip to the orchard. You’re kind-of living in it and you’re living with all that goes with it - the smell, the flies, etc. It’s okay in summer, but in the autumn, it actually smells of decay and becomes depressing. So, when we moved to our current location about 35 years ago, the first thing we agreed on was where to put the orchard and about 20 yards away was just perfect. Well that orchard gave us plenty of joy over the years. As the saplings grew into trees, so too did our little children grow into long gangly teenagers, full of promise and angst in equal measure. In fact, our children and our apple trees have a very close relationship in terms of documentary evidence. What I mean to say is that when we look through all the photos that we took of our children growing up, about 99% of them are taken either in the orchard or around the orchard with the apple trees forming a backdrop to the picture. So, we can track the growth of both and in each case (children and trees), the rate of growth and change is really remarkable. At the moment, my wife and I are putting together an album of all those photos. We’re going to pick out a strategic number of them that will show the story of our orchard and of our family and then post it online so that they can all see it. But there’s a point when it all ends - the long hours in the garden and the multiple photos of the orchard and of the children. It took us a while to figure it out. When they were three, four and five, we seemed to be constantly in the garden. Then, even in their teenage years, they still were there, but it seemed to stop abruptly. June, my wife, spotted it immediately: “It’s the flies,” she said. “Suddenly, we had too many flies and nobody wanted to stay in the garden or go anywhere near the orchard.” She was right. So I got it into my head that we would reclaim the orchard from the flies. This was part of our family heritage that we created and watched grow before our eyes and no bunch of dirty insects was going to take it from us. I got onto a neighbor of mine who was always telling us about fly predators review and pest control products. We got some mosquito spray (the organic kind - I didn’t even know that there was such a thing!) and a starter fly predator pack. My neighbor George knew all that there was to know about how to get rid of flys and seeing as we knew practically nothing of the subject, we follow his program to get rid of flies to the letter. It wasn’t long before we were able to make perfect homemade fly trap and were experts in the field and in the orchard. The photographs have resumed and so has our idyllic life.