Leaving the fruit in the bag traps the ethylene produced by ripening fruit, which accelerates the ripening. If you want fruit to ripen quickly, put it in a paper bag to capture ethylene gas, but take fruit out of the bag when you put in the frig to slow down ripening. Keeping fruit in plastic bags will make it rot quicker because the trapped moisture encourages mold. The reason everyone started talking about canning so quickly, was they thought that they might have a chance to prevent you poisoning yourself and others with improperly canned fruit. Botulism has no taste or odor, but will kill you. Other organisms can make you wish we were dead for a few days of uncontrolled diarrhea and bowel cramps. Properly preserved fruits grown at home are great and often taste better than commercially grown fresh fruit, but you must do it properly. The reason fruit preservers are called fruit preservers is that before modern canning equipment and procedures were available, that was the safest and easiest way to preserve fresh fruits. Adding sugar to the fruit and boiling it to reduce off part of the water in the fruit was the best way to raise the boiling point of water above 212F/100C, which killed most microbes. This allowed people to have fruits during long winter months when sources of vitamin C were scarce.

Thanks, Newbie, The experiment is over. I released 11 healthy Monarchs. The last 4 eclosed today. I'll do this again, but with bigger bags. I'll limit it to Monarchs, though. They seem to be perfect for Paper Bag Raising. Tdogmom, in one of the earlier posts, I proposed that you could add some kind of window if you felt you needed to constantly see them. I'm not for sure what I would make it out of, but tulle would work. I got to where I could look through the bags, held up to the light, and tell where the cats or chrysalides were. After interrupting the one that was pupating, I made sure I didn't fold the bag down quite as far. I also learned that when the food was gone, the cats crawled up the sides of the bag. Frass was so easy to clean out. I just dumped it out as it was very dry. I think you would want to put in caterpillars that had all hatched at approximately the same time. I put in caterpillars that I found on the plants and sorted them in the bags by size. That worked out pretty well. Success rate compares favorably with container raised cats. As I have raised over a 1000 Monarch cats, I'm not as inclined to need to see them. So, this fall when I am collecting 50 or more eggs a day, I'll probably use grocery bags and sandwich bags, as well as containers, to rear the masses! ; ) Sandy

Congratulations on the air layering. I'd never heard of it until I went to an old Greek guy's house. He was doing it in some odd ways, using real dirt and getting great results. He told me that he would always wait 3 months before cutting the branch from the mother tree, but do as you feel best of course. I was so amazed that I took pictures and made a furum thread about it. CLICK HERE Only in the thread did I learn that this is called air layering. The old Greek guy was a fig grower in Greece as a young man, and told me that this is the best way to propigate fig trees. I see your results are very good too. I will try this myself staring in the spring.

The brown wood is probably last year's growth, the green portion is most likely this year's growth. I would cut off the green portion and put the brown wood either in damp potting soil, or wrap in barely damp newspaper or paper towel and place in a ziploc bag. Search the forum for the different systems of propagation, there are several and they all work. The green portion can be rooted, I have heard, but I think more difficult than the brown, one year old wood. Cut off most of the leaves and all of the little fruit and put into a pot with damp potting soil, and cover this with some sort of plastic bag to keep the humidity high. I have had zero success with rooting in water. Several times I have had roots form, but they seem more fragile, and when placed into soil they have always died. Usually the cutting itself just rots when I try rooting in water.