About Us

Fruit Tree Covers is a Utah-based business dedicated to helping people grow high quality healthy fruit. 

Jim and Janene Wilson are the founders of Fruit Tree Covers. They have been growing fruit trees for much of the past 45 years in Washington, Idaho and Utah. They have experience with a wide variety of pest management approaches. They have tried chemical spraying, organic spraying, not spraying (also known as eating around the worms), and the Japanese technique of applying small protective bags to each fruit.

They used the small bag technique effectively for over 15 years. While the bags do a decent job of keeping codling moths from ruining apples and pears, the bags are very time consuming to apply even on a moderate scale. The small bag technique does not work well with stone fruits. Applying bags to one semi-dwarf apple tree takes four workers two full days to apply about 1200 small bags. By contrast deploying one Kootenay Cover over the same apple tree takes about 30-40 minutes. The small bags deliver about 90% good apples when applied correctly. The Kootenay Cover delivers 99% good fruit when applied correctly. 

For Jim and Janene, keeping an orchard is part of a larger backyard quality eating program that includes raising vegetables and chickens. We also grow apples, cherries, pears, peaches, apricots, nectarines, grapes, currants and plums.

 

 

Jim and Janene first started using Kootenay Covers as customers. They started Fruit Tree Covers, LLC to make Kootenay Covers available throughout the United States and beyond.

Their vision for Fruit Tree Covers is to share with others the satisfaction they have experienced over many seasons of raising fruit. Having had great success using Kootenay Covers, they are hoping that using the covers can empower others to grow healthy delicious bug-free fruit, too. 

Jim and Janene also grow a large vegetable garden and a wide variety of flowers, including dahlias and perennials.