Technical question about apple bags
glib
12 years ago
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ltilton
12 years agonorthwoodswis4
12 years agoRelated Discussions
Scottfsmith - Spinosad and Surround for bagged apple question.
Comments (9)Bill, I used to bag fruits but it is a huge amount of work and at some point I decided to go the spray only route. It depends how many trees you have. Re: using Surround/spinosad to temporarily hold back the pests while you bag, thats a good idea. Bart is right about a long, hard rain, it will wash most of it off. The good news is there are not many long hard rains and you can usually be looking at the weather and timing sprays to be right after those hard rain periods. I did my first spray of Surround ten days ago and most of it is still on, I did it right after a huge rainy period. I need to get it on my apples now but since there is chances of rain all I did was do a quick targeted spray at clusters a few days ago. I plan on doing a major Surround/spinosad tomorrow after the thunderstorms of tonight pass through. I haven't used spinosad yet since the moths start to show up at apple petal fall / peach shuck split. Oh, that reminds me, I gotta get my mating disruption out NOW! I am always doing it too late because theres always a lot going on in the orchard around now. Disruption needs to be out a bit before apple petal fall to be on the safe side. Scott...See MoreBagging Apples: wait for fruit drop or bag now?
Comments (7)Paul and/or Irene: I am totally on board with tcstoehr on this one. Get up there and thin those apples immediately, to one fruit per cluster. When you do, you may notice there is already some apparently minor insect damage in the form of small scars, holes, or just dark colored lines. These imperfections that may seem minor now will later become major. So start by thinning all those apples off that have even the slightest imperfections. After that, go for the fattest, fastest-developing fruit. Once the chosen fruit is alone in the cluster, bag it. Waiting for fruit drop is a recipe for disaster if you have any kind of insect activity around. By leaving more than one fast-developing fruit in the cluster you are ensuring that neither or none of them will grow up to its full potential. Once all but one has been removed, the one you leave will begin to grow even faster. Unhappiness is thinning off all but one fat apple, then finding out the one you have selected has also been selected by the plum curculio or codling moth on the side you could not see. I am thinning right now, and my apples are much smaller than one inch. However, I am able to idenfity those with the best potential, and usually find the insect damage in time to remove it. Clusters of apples are more attractive to insects than singleton fruits. Insects are efficiency experts. I usually work with a small scissors when I can clearly see what I am doing, but if I have to reach into the tree I also try to roll or break off the apples gently with my fingers. You have to be careful because fruiting clusters are still quite tender at this time of year, and can be easily broken off. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA...See MoreBagging apples story & question
Comments (13)Mark, there are indeed many things not understood about food and chemicals. When I was looking up info on underripe peaches for someone here, I learned that there appears to be be a chemical in underripe peaches which a few people have a very bad reaction to (like fava beans) .. something not known until a couple years ago. Also, I think we have a similar view about big business: they are generally a greed&profit machine which takes a "cover our b*tts" approach as opposed to a holistic view. So there has been and will continue to be unsafe products sold. But there are also checks and balances in the form of lawsuits, consumer groups, laws, etc which weed out many things. In the end the main thing that really bothers me about todays big businesses is how they lobby government so heavily and effectively to keep the laws on their side and not on the side of the rest of us. Recently I learned that Monsanto successfully sued someone who had been saving their own seeds for 50 years to stop, because some of "their" genes drifted onto his plants. Whats nuts there is not the court, but the legislature that passed a law which made illegal in some cases the thousands-year old practice of seed saving. So, my feeling is on the personal safety side the system works OK today, both because the science is generally good and the laws are strong and businesses know it. The baseball team in our town is not owned by the owner of the asbestos factory, it is owned by the lawyer that sued 'em (maybe the laws work *too* well sometimes). When it doesn't work as well is when risks are more nebulous: are some of the pesticides and other bad chemicals we bump into in our environment responsible for increased cancer risk overall? For food (or packaging), scientists can just go to the grocery, buy some produce, and test it. Its a lot harder to measure general environmental exposure to chemicals. We know some chemicals are bad, the question is how much exposure people are actually getting and how much we should tolerate. My dads golfing buddy got poisoned to death by lawn chemicals. Why? The studies didn't consider the case that someone may pop their golf balls in their mouth for a final cleaning. I am concerned about enviromental exposure to chemicals, its not up there with driving deaths and overeating, but its a concern. I limit use of toxic chemicals in my orchard partly for that reason, my kids play area is the yard which is my orchard. One of my daughters got elevated lead levels due to lead paint in our house. She was short of the "danger" category but it got me realizing I would rather err on the side of caution for my kids. Scott...See MoreQuestion about bagging
Comments (13)And what to do in the winter. :) Go to Home Depot and buy a lot of the filmy white "sewer" cloth in the outside garden section. Fold to cut bags like 6x6 inches with the bottom a fold to make it easier. Now staple the 2 sides making a bag. Maybe spray with surround If you have problems before the fruit start coloring (nectarines) or curculio. Then thin ( I keep my trees low and wide like the Japanese who bag everything. After thinning to a min. 6" apart to 8" slip the bags over the fruit and the branch, pinch together and secure with a paper clip with some body. Not the really thin wire kind. This has many advantages. the birds don't see the fruit nor the squirrels for a while. Also you can spray like captan on the bags for bitter rot and the tree and get much less on the apples. also brown rot for instance does not spread from fruit to fruit and ruin all. I am experimenting with serenade and 1 cup molasses per gallon of water as a good fungicide. Unlike sulfur which we cannot use in the heat the molasses mix caused no damage to trees or fruit. Also it breathes! plastic could set mildew pretty good I think altho I use newspaper bags on my papayas as soon as petals almost gone for fruit fly with holes from a knife point thruout and the bottom corners cut. They will last 2 years with care. Rinse thoroly in in something fungicidal at the end of the season, dry and store. hope this makes you a happy camper. I love having almost all perfect fruits. Oh, on the wasps. Try making either a very large pot of partly cooked dry northern beans left in the pot to ferment with say 4 " of top space OR spare fruits fermenting. They should go in and all drown....See Moreltilton
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