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.

Oh Karen, you will, you will!!!! Here's how it works... your first couple of years of WSing you're filling up every inch of dirt at you disposal in your yard with those babies. Then at the end of the second or third summer, you look around and say "whoaaaaa...there's a LOT of ripe seed out here!!!!" You harvest more than you can ever use in a lifetime EACH season and suddenly your in these group round robin swaps with hundreds of seed packages flying through the US mail. It's REALLY easy to go through a box of 500 little zippys.... The postman is my Santa, Nancy

localhero, If the strip won't heat up when you push "seal," then I think the heater isn't working either. You should be able to make it stop vacuuming and start heating any time you want by pressing "seal" (if you are sealing things like bread that can get smushed by the strong vacuum, or things that are moist such that liquid starts to get sucked out, you sometimes want to cut off the vacuuming a bit early this way). One bonus feature I love about my FS is that I can use JUST "seal" to reclose things like chip and cookie bags. Z P.S. I have only had one model, I think it's a 2240---it looks a lot like the 850 picture but I have no bag cutter. The fancier ones seem to mostly have convenience: bag storage, upright design to save counter space. Some have an automatic bag "feeder" function, where I guess instead of placing the bag end in and closing the lid you slip it into a slot and it is fed in the right amount. But I knew I DIDN'T want that (I would have paid extra to AVOID it, lol)---that kind of thing always seems to be fussy and to break first in a machine. Does the 850 have "hands free"? Some of the really basic ones I guess you have to hold it down while the vacuum is vacuuming. With mine you close the lid and pull a little locking lever, then push the "vacuum & seal" or the "seal" buttons. Good luck! Z P.S. Do be sure to check out the SweetAttack site in earlier posts for cheaper bags. The brand-name FS ones are pricey. But with cheap bags you can really save $$ with this thing by putting up food when it's in season and on sale and still having it be top-quality. You do need to make sure the seal is perfect. I've had a few bags of things lose their seal and get freezer burn because I hadn't noticed there was a TINY wrinkle in the bag opening when I sealed it---the air sucks out and the package looks totally vacuumed, but a few days later it's all loose and full of air. Every time this happens I look carefully and can find the little wrinkle. Some of the folks here say they double-seal, just in case, and their failure rate then is pretty much zero. I'm thinking to start doing that for meats or fruits that I know I'll be keeping for a while. Z

I completely agree, Rusty. Everybody claimed to be so happy with the way the thing worked that I thought there must be some knack for getting it to hold a seal, and I just didn't have the touch. I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one. I've already got a regular vacuum sealer--just thought one of these would be good for small things like pieces of cheese in the fridge, with the bonus that the bags didn't have to be cut down each time you used them, and eventually thrown away like the FoodSaver bags. And the gadget itself hardly takes up any space. But it just wasn't working for me. Of course, now that the bags are a collector's item, I'll probably start hyperventilating about not having a lifetime supply. ;o)