Hi
I used Japanese and Chinese apple protection bags last year with great success. This year I plan to bring in a large quantity and will have them for sale. You bag the apple when it is the size of say an olive, wrapping the embedded wire around the stem. You remove the bag a week or three prior to fully ripe to allow the apple to color up.
Specs: Double Wall Bags designed for bagging apples on trees.
1 Inner red material bag
2 Outer brown paper bag
3 Embedded wire along edge extending out 30mm
4 size 140x180 or 143x190 or 150x180 or 150x185
5 Drain hole
I don’t have any pricing yet until I get a feel if anyone is interested.
I will put up pricing after I get feedback.
I learned a very little bit about these last year and I thought I read the bags were treated with trace amounts of pesticides which is what made me just use ziplocs.
Looks like the paper bags would be easier to use than the ziplock bags that I currently use. The reasons I use ziplocks is for there low cost and availability. Bill
Bill,
I got similar bags from Clemson. I saw the bag demonstration from Clemson website. it looks harder to put it on a fruit as you have to gather the top well together before you can wrap a tie around it.
Clemson offer ones with thin, white paper so there is no need or taking off the bags for coloring up. These bags are a neat alternative option.
I am interested to know the pricing Patrick will charge.
Hi Guys,
I am working with the major Chinese producer of these bags. Last year our club, MidFEx.org, tried a slew of the two piece red and brown bags, WITHOUT the 3 cm extended leg, BUT having the wire along the side and the drain hole, and the consensus was they don’t stay on. (The idea is the outer bag made of brown Kraft paper is removed a week or three before harvest, leaving the red cellophane like inner bag to color up the apple.) So my thinking was let’s get the same two piece bag assembly with the inner wire along the side also extended 3 cm out to help initial assembly as well as help keeping them on the tree. Apparently no one over there makes the two piece bag that way, and are also unwilling to do it. The Clemson bag is considered a Peach bag by the several Chinese companies who make bags. All this technology was started in Japan what twenty years ago, and the bags and production machinery (which is key) were imported to China and cloned and an industry was born. By the way it is very hard to assemble the two piece bag without the extended leg on olive size apples. You often pull the apples off when trying. If I cannot succeed in obtaining two piece brown outer red inner bags with the extended leg, this year our club will probably go with the Clemson white bag. I don’t know whether white or brown bags are the larger squirrel deterrent which is a big issue because squirrels learn very fast. TBD.
Squirrels and raccoons are my problem. They also have a keen sense of smell, which the bags have a hard time covering up… I cannot wait to see how well the Clemson bags do. And I’d like to try Patricks’ too! Anything is worth a shot!
One of these days I will post results of several kinds of bags I have used.
Most bags cannot protect against squirrels. They take fruit with bags and all. The only bag that could work is the one made of window screen mesh I think. I never use it but a few others have.
Hi All
All the Clemson, Chinese, Japanese bags had succumbed to squirrels and raccoons so I went to organza and then to coarse mesh nylon etc. I really thought I had a winner for two seasons with the coarse mesh nylon bags. So the second season I invested heavily in more of them because I had Japanese quality apples with them the first season. The third season the squirrels finally figured it out and tore em apart. See another thread here (Re- evaluating bagging fruit - #74 by patrick) post #74 Ã — where I showed nearly ten different kinds of bags that I had tested, some of them shipped directly to me from Japanese and Chinese suppliers. Other members of our club, MidFEx, solve the squirrel problem by greatly reducing their population. The season is creeping up and I am lost once again.
@mamuang@patrick That’s disappointing to hear. I’m going to try a combination of bagging, deterrent sprays and application of bittering agent on a sample of unbagged fruit. If that doesn’t work sufficiently I’m switching to more lethal methods next year.
I have used the vented ziplock bags and they have mostly been successful. Recently I have also been using a few Broganza bags (name intended to be a joke) and they appear to work also but they do tend to get that dirty look over the course of a season of exposure. Our gray squirrles are plentiful but have been slow to learn about taking the whole bag.
