Re- evaluating bagging fruit

They look good. Glad your bagging effort worked. My experience is that surround on the bags also confuses birds and they don’t peck through the bags.

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So i removed the water filled bag. Maybe i should have vented it! Still tasted fine and was very large.


I’m surprised it didn’t rot more. I put plastic over my sweet bagel peaches (donut/very late ripening).

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Bill,
Strictly speaking of bagging and stone fruit, I have found that with organza bags, my stone fruit crack much more than the ones in bread bags. My guess is water goes through organza bags more thoroughly so it creates more cracks.

However, spray also gets in organza bags more readily resulting in better protection ( fungicide particularly).

So, organza bags, less rot, more cracks.
Bread Bags more rot, less cracks.

Neither’s perfect :tired_face:

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Rob,
I am surprised that there pwas no rot in your bags. I don’t think it would work in my area. Even with two corners cut off, some of my fruit look distressed with heat and moisture inside bags.

Just want to show a side by side result of peaches, one with a bread bag coated by Surround and the other with a Clemson paper bag.

Both peaches are clean. The Clemson peach’s color is paler while the bread bag 's got more sun and has darker color.

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Sweet?

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I just looked at some Flavor Queen that are bread bagged…look like some cracking happening. Must be too much moisture building up in there and the skin is absorbing it…cracking them…like a rainfall…hmmm

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After the raccoon got 11 of my 12 apples on my small tree with 7 grafts, the only thing left that I was protecting was my Dapple Dandy pluot which still had about 12 clean fruit nicely bagged. Others were bagged but split and rotted. I covered it with bird netting to protect it from the birds that had been pecking the fruit. This morning all the pluots were gone except for one runt. Very frustrating with pruning, spraying, bagging, netting and than only having one undersized pluot.

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Something ripped the bags of my 3 Flavor King opened and took the fruit. The fruit were far from ripen.

@danzeb, I really feel for you. I got several of my first time fruit taken by animals. No wonder why some of us pick up a gun. Those pests do not leave us with many options.

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Man it does suck to lose fruit to varmints this late in the season. I’ve been pretty lucky the past few weeks…just a few pears gone…squirrels. I put a big sheet of plastic over my Flavor King probably over a month ago…and that has worked very well. Actually picked a few today…they are already softening a lot…some have dropped to the ground. Its like a little greenhouse…i just tied it off so it can’t blow away.

This year was the year of the bird pecking for me. Never have i seen so much of it. Everything …from cherries, to the cots, to peaches, to nectarines, plums, apples…

While driving around on the far side of the orchard, I spotted a bag up in an oak tree. Still had some remains of an apple in it. Some squirrel or critter took the bag on and all up the tree and it stuck in the bark. If you don’t tie the bags to a branch the critters pull them off and haul them away.

In my experience, it does not matter you tie bags to a branch or not. Squirrels can bite through plastic bags, eat chunnk of fruit if they cannot take the whole fruit with them.

The only bag that can prevent squirrels from biting through is the screen bags @MrClint has suggested to us.

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Squirrels went right through my bread bag… The birds did leave them alone though. It was a half success. No matter what you have to kill all squirrels or get them out of the area.

I have tried 8 diffedent bag types this year…footsies,organza fine net, zip lock,chineese 2 layer brown,clemson,japanese 2 layer blue, new japanese white, organza course net. Winner this year for bugs, disease, and SQUIRRELS = Organza Course Net

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I tried organza bags this year but something was able to damage the apples right through the bag- not sure if it was insect or bird. I was going to switch to something else next year. Patrick- where did you get your coarse organza bags- they look a lot different than mine.

Those look like a good quality bags. Can they be used again next season?

Yes. I’ve had them 2 yrs and they look fine except when the squirrels chew them. Sold on Ebay. They come in different sizes. The 10x6 in size sells for about $10 for 50. The smaller ones are $4.50 for 50.

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Thanks

I ziploc bagged half of my apples at thinning time. Cut the corners off and kept them puffed up for good air circulation. There has been a bit of sunburn on goldrush but not too bad. I had some rot on GR and williams pride regardless of bagging. I did not take detailed notes but I failed to notice a difference between bagged and unbagged except for sooty blotchy and fly speck, which I don’t care about. I saw one curculio scar on an unbagged one and zero ofm or coddling moth damage on anything. I don’t like that the apples seem to ripen early in the bags. I want my gr to hang but they are starting to drop already prior to much cool weather.
I plan to give surround a try next year.

When your trees are young they don’t seem seem to get as many bugs as after a few years. I think it takes a while for the bugs to find them.

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