Thanks Appleseed. The photos are from another shop that had a full line of chemicals to cover every imaginable peach problem. However, the staff aren’t knowledgeable and my language skills not good enough to determine the minuimum required poisons needed. I think this may be an organic year for me.
Apples aren’t all go after petal fall. But if thinned adequately then not many fall after they reach the size of the end of your finger. That’s assuming no insect damage.
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You may want to take that tag off/loosen it in the second pic. Looks a bit too tight.
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They’re still a bit small, but thought I’d try a few. There are maybe hundreds of fruit. If I thin to every 6", there will still be a lot. Many of the branches seem too thin to support a bunch of full-size peaches, but I suppose the branches will thicken up during the season? How many fruit can this tree support anyways? Right now it’s about 8 feet tall by about 6 feet around. I expect it to grow vigorously like last year.
I may try the thicker bags, as I found these to be weak, and the wire often not long enough.
I found it difficult to find fruit ideally positioned to wrap the bag around the supporting branch and the fruit. Even when I did, I had to rip out all the leaves that were sprouting from the shoot so they don’t get it in the bag. Some fruit in very stout looking positions, like coming out of the trunk, we’re simply too thick to get the bag around. Also, you can’t really see what you’re doing and you really need a lot of pressure to get the bag closed tight enough so a bug can’t squeeze through. It’s easy to rip the fruit off while you’re doing that.
One peach every 6" is minimum if you have lot of fruit. One every 8" is fine. Some people go even further for larger and better quality peaches. If you leave them too close, they can grow into each other, too.
You also need to have enough leaves per friuit ratio so leaves could feed the fruit. I take off all fruit on the branches that have no leaves ( it happens when trees overset). All twins and triplets (or more) are gone first.
bagging with this type of bags is not easy esp.with such tiny fruitfruit. I would consider using a bread bag to cover a whiole branch or several fruit at a time.
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Thanks It should be ok, it’s one of those tear away ones.
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Is that ratio per branch , or the tree as a whole?
Im skeptical how this is going to work out 100% percent organic. With the grapes, I could see it because you can really tighten and isolate the bunch off on its own stem. But these peaches, wrapping around the branch too, leaves a lot of intersections to cover.
When they are a bit bigger, are the stems tough like grapes, and facilitate fruit-only branch-free tieing? Or will tieing the bag snap the stem?
I don’t know about others, I have often said peach is the toughest fruit tree to grow for me. That probably true for any hot and humid area.
Organic methods can include spraying. Scott Smith probably is the best person to tell you how successful growing peaches organically can ( or can’t) be. Bagging fruit that has almost no stem is never easy.
I spaceat least 6" per fruit, from one fruit to the next. It is a rule of thumb. You can adjust it to you preference and learn from it. Some small twigs may not even be able to support a peach. It is hard to over thin peaches. They set tons if not naturally thinned by frost or freeze first.
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Ok, sounds like the no stem makes all bagging more risky.
On this tree every peach stem has a bunch of leaves bushing out too. I assume it ok to rip those out befor bagging, as I can’t see leaves stuck around or in the bag being any good.
I’m still unclear exactly how OFM gets at the fruit. The moth lays eggs on the fruit? Or do tiny worms crawl all over the tree, attracted to ripening fruit? Or…?
If it’s migratory tiny worms, I’m skeptical these bags will be able to have a seal tight enough to deny entry.
And how about stink bugs? Lots of those everywhere here. I could see an adult having trouble getting in a bag.
Well, I just finished bagging and thinning - what a massacre! I kept maybe every 1/10, and still ended up with maybe 50 bags. I’ll be happy if half that make it to harvest.
Took me about 2 hours. Tree is in excellent health - lots of ‘good guy’-looking bugs. Only a few damaged fruit.
Next time I’ll bring some tight gloves, as a few dangerous looking bugs in there, fortunately it’s a bit cool tonight so they’re looking pretty dopey.
A few observations:
The bagging itself is pretty easy, what makes it difficult is the following:
bags could be better designed (by making them a bit longer which would enable a deeper V and lengthening the wire a bit. This would allow easier tieing). Anything over a pencil thickness of branch and it simply wasn’t enough to tie it up. Even in an ideal situation there’s only enough wire to get one wrap. It would be better to have lots of “tassel” to wrap around. I got a feeling I’m gonna have to redo a lot of these bags throughout the season;
Location of many simply fruit wasn’t good for bagging;
Easy to damage shoots in cramped courters.
Thanks for sharing our observations.
That will help me consider which fruit to remove. I’ll consider removing fruits that are in “a difficult location to bag”, besides twins, tripets, etc. ,
Just an update: I went up tonight and they’re growing very quickly, some are the size of golf balls. Quite a few of the bags were empty. I believe what happened is the stem was damaged while putting the bag on, the fruit shriveled up and fell off. I had missed bagging a few, or the bags had blown off,and they were very visible now, so I used my grape bags . The grape bags are of a higher quality paper, construction, waxed finish, and more generous so much easier to put on. I’m going to use the grape bags from now on.
Just harvested most of them tonight. I had kind of forgotten about them, but noticed a couple of the bags were torn, when I took him off saw ants near the stem on most of them. So I decide to pull me st of them even though they risking being too green.
Most of the ants appeared to be shuttling small white Maggot looking things from the stem of the peach to the branch. They had even made very minor holes near the stem on the fruit in some cases. Any idea what’s going on and how to stop it? I’m guessing tanglefoot, although this tree has got several paths from the ground up I can’t get rid of.
Tried one of the more ripe ones and it tasted really good. Hopefully these will ripen OK.