Mark: With apologies to all the Fruit & Orchard webbers who must be bored silly with my frequent posts on fruit bagging, in excruciating detail, I will try to answer your questions. A search may not easily turn up just the info you want, since the content of many threads is not accurately reflected in their titles. 1. Ziplock bags work very well indeed on apples and pears, but not on stone fruits. On peaches, I use nylon shoe store try-on footies that are breathable, yet protect against plum curculio and oriental fruit moth. I also use footies on one variety of apple, Macoun, which has practically no stem at all, preventing me from closing a ziplock around the stem. Athena is correct that it is impossible to properly install a plastic ziplock on peaches because of the absence of a stem, and also because earwigs can enter the gap and damage peaches. I draw the line at bagging apricots and plums because of their small size and numbers, but if you do, use the footies. Please don't try to bag cherries. 2. Install the bags just after you have thinned the fruit to one per blossom cluster. The bags stay on all season long, and apples left in the bags when stored in refrigeration will keep much longer without shriveling. So the answer is remove the bag when you are ready to eat the apple or pear. 3. No reasonable person would try to put more than one fruit in a bag. If you want to leave more than one apple or pear per cluster, (which I do not recommend), use more than one bag. 4. There are no negative consequences to using bags other than perhaps a slight delay in coloring of apples due to filtration of UV rays by the plastic. I am convinced that apples in bags grow larger than those without them. 5. Of course the bags give protection from insects. That's why we use them. I do spray the apples twice before thinning and bagging since the plum curculio strikes early here, but there is no reason to spray after the bags are installed -- at least for fruit protection. If the trees become infested with aphids or something like that, there may be other reasons to spray. I also do an early spray on pome fruits for cedar apple rust (Ferbam) and fireblight (streptomycin), but you may not need these where you live. 6. Ziplocks require some preparation before installation, which consists of cutting off the bottom corners, and slitting and removing the plastic above the zipper to facilitate installation on the apple or pear. 7. Do not try to save used bags from year to year. Throw them out and start over. Bags are cheap. UV breaks them down and weakens them. 8. If these answers generate more questions of the "why" variety, I would then refer to you to the Gardenweb search function, where threads can be found that answer just about all the "why" questions that the human mind can conceive. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Losing a few leaves is no big deal. Losing a lot of leaves will be hard on the tree and crop. You would need to thin off more fruit to compensate.

I saw a nice air rifle on sale at Sports Authority, but if you want to bag then the best method I've found for papaya is to use women nylon knee high stockings. You can buy them for 35 to 50 cents a pair at Walmart. You put on the stocking when the fruit is very small and it just grows in the mesh -- no fruit fly issues. For other fruits, I use the plastic containers but this is the first year that I've used them so I don't know if they'll work or not.

If your small tree sets multiple fruit in a cluster, you might want to snip off all but one when still small. I have had squirrels knock down 1", 2", and 3" paw paws leaving them on the ground with a few teeth marks, so as for when to bag them to keep them uninteresting to squirrels, it is your call. For me, I wait until the fruit are maybe half grown before bagging them, or until the squirrels start knocking them down repeatedly. I have used tan colored plastic grocery bags with the loop handles pulled over the fruit branch and tied into a somewhat loose knot. After more than 100 bags enclosing fruit over 2 years, not even one bag was torn up by a critter to reach the fruit. Not by squirrels, possums, raccoons, crows, wasps, woodpeckers, etc. If I only had a few precious fruit to protect and I suspected that coons or possums were around to threaten them, I would probably take it a step further and spray the bag every now and then with some stinky poison like ant and roach aerosol to further dissuade them. If you are eager to see your young tree become a fruit maker, you might want to mulch it with decaying leaves, keep it weed free, fertilize regularly, and keep the soil moist continually.