How is your fruit bagging going? Anything new or are you modifying your bagging method? How many fruit have you bagged? Are you using ziploc bags or something else?
As for me I’m about half finished bagging apples and I have a large assortment of varieties. Due to grafting Goldrush heavily early on and its tendency to over fruit a majority of my bagging went to GR. The majority of my pear bagging has been on Harrow Sweet.
Something new to me is bagging a few large clusters of pears (leaves removed from bag) together especially on trees or limbs that are under fruited as a whole. Not sure how this will go but looks promising as of now.
Plums/Pluots. All my plums are in bags as of two days ago. The numbers of plums on my trees are not heavy so I found it easier to bag and skip the surround spray. I was surprised at how easy they were to bag when they get larger. Got my fingers crossed that the wind doesn’t blow them off.
I got either earwigs or codling moth into my plastic zipper sandwich bags in 2020. In 2021, I made the cut through the zipper just a little bit longer into the bag material to get a better seal around the fruit stem. Cannot tell if this is more effective because it seems to be a low codling-moth year with the June drought in Wisconsin, but so far so good.
The problem I have is that I bagged a lot of dime-sized fruit to beat the plum curculio, and on one tree, it seems like at least 2/3rds of the bags are on the ground. The fruit that is golf ball size is staying on, but the fruit that only grew to nickel size has dropped.
Yes, June drop, and this year had a cold spell in late spring during bloom time – it didn’t wreck the blooms but it may have discouraged pollination – where did I read that bees huddle in their hive until it gets to at least 50 deg-F?
Anyone have a better practice that I don’t put so many bags on and then have to “police” the school yard orchard where the bags are placed to pick up all of the plastic litter?
If you keep in mind that you fruit should be thinned off 70-80% and can actually do it, you will have little to no June drop issue with apples.
When I thinned, I, sometimes, thinned several clusters of flowers off before they set fruit. Then, thinned more off after fruit set. Don’t be afraid of thinning off whole clusters of apples if they are several near one another or too many on a branch.
People usually do not thin enough. June drop can definitely be minimized by thinning.
You will improve the ratio of fruit that stays on after bagging. I still have some drops but not as many as I had when I first started. My method on apples is to bag at about dime size. This is a good time to thin and discard damaged fruit. I almost never bag more than one per cluster and space the clusters so they aren’t crowded. It’s not a perfect system but I still bag after several years.
I am doing much of what you are saying, dime size, one per cluster. The thing I didn’t do is that I think I got too greedy and didn’t space the clusters. The combination of very dry conditions (I did water this dwarf tree, but even so) and the poor pollination conditions may have contributed to the drop, but I will try more spacing next season.
Spraying with Spinosad/surround until the fruit is gumball size or larger seems to have helped cut the drops for me. By that size you can usually tell which apples are likely to fall, those with yellowish stems and smaller size. It is frustrating to go to all that work of bagging to see 75% of it all end up on the ground.