The bagging starts

Only my plums drop. My peaches I take most of them off of the tree, and definitely remove all doubles.

Susu,
Your fruit are peaches? I have not noticed peach drop. Iā€™ve had apple drop. Plums- mostly they turn yellow very young and drop. I assume those lack pollination.

I just thinned hundreds of Euro plums yesterday, several approached good size olive already. :tired_face:

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Iā€™ve not ever seen june drop on peaches Iā€™ve thinned. Even peaches overloaded will generally keep their fruit and produce golf ball sized peaches breaking the branches down, but they still wonā€™t drop. I know there is plenty written about June drop of peaches, but from what Iā€™ve seen the trees would have to be extremely overloaded, and/or under some significant stress to gratuitously drop fruit.

I get some wind blown peaches when the winds are high. I can also blow some off with my airblast sprayer as they start to size up, if I run the airblast up to full rpm.

One thing that peaches do that Sean describes is that a certain amount of peach fruitlets will sit there about nickle size and never get any bigger, while the others will keep growing. Eventually the fruits which were nickle sized will abort. This has nothing to do with fruit load and I donā€™t think this is what is traditionally thought of as June drop.

I get pre-harvest drop. This is fairly common for me. As the fruit starts to get soft, it signals the tree to let it go. Sometimes any small jarring will cause the fruit to drop. Some varieties are worse than others. Belle of Georgia was probably the worst. Couldnā€™t hardly pick a peach without another one dropping.

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Thank you, Olpea for your response. My experience mirrors yours.

The only June drops I have experienced is with apples. Even that, mine has always been a light to very light drop. I believe it is because I thin apples very early so the trees do not feel the need to drop more fruit.

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I bagged today all 24 plums on my Mt. Royal plum tree. That was very easy and took less then 30 min. I think I longer was searching for the plum, than installing the bag. I bought 100ct organza bags 2ā€™ā€˜X3ā€™ā€™, perfect size for this plum, I think. I didnā€™t even need to tie the bugs, after pulling the strings they feel very secure. Canā€™t post picture now - it started to rain. May be later todayā€¦

Here are the pictures:

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Yup,
The organza bags are so easy to put on. I do tie the string on a branch. If not, when wind gust is over 35 mph, I fear that they may not stay on.

Mine are a bigger size for peaches. They sent me free smaller size for plums but this year, I have tons of plums. I think I will try to bag a whole branch instead of individual fruit.

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Let us know how those non-standard bags work out.
About the fruit breaking off in the bag, I had a lot of that last year. I know it wasnā€™t June drop. Turns out the stem got damaged while putting the bag on and I of course couldnā€™t see. Especially when the fruit is really small, it doesnā€™t take much to break it off.
This year I bagged about 200, it took me hours.

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I have been trying to bag for many years. I have used ziplock modified bags, the single layer Clemson, the two layer Japanese, the two layer Chinese, the footsies, the string tie net bags, etc. etc.
I am not satisfied with any of them. Clemson gets theirs from the same Chinese company that I have been working with for two years. The Clemsons [white thin paper] dont hold up in the rain and come off. The Chinese bags [brown] are whimpy with the embedded wire and also come off and tear. The Japanese bags [blue] are a just little stronger with a whimpy embeded wire, and the string tie mesh net bags [white mesh] have their problems, and the footsies start with the right approach but dont work in the end.
Squirrels get them all, and earwigs find a way in. I am just not satisfied with anyones solution thusfar.

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It is frustrating to have fruit loss from insects and squirrelā€™s. The only bagging that I have done is with vented sandwich bags so I have no knowledge of all the other types of bagging. Iā€™m assuming that your like me and prefer not to be spraying chemical on the fruit I will be eating. My process this year was to spray with surround until the fruit was about 1/2" and then bag the lower ones. My bags have done a good job of eliminating most all the insect damage to my apples and pears but they still are a pain to install. As of now the squirrels have not bothered the fruit for over three years. If they ever catch on to the fruit in the bag Iā€™m sure my losses to them will increase. Although this is my first season to use surround it might be a decent method to combat insect damage but the squirrels would still be a problem. Not really sure what Iā€™m trying to say with this post but I hope you keep on trying to figure out an effective means to get to harvest your hard earned fruit.

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Patrick,
May I ask why the footsies do not work in the end? Is it because os squirrels? What kind of fruit do you bag?

Like @Auburn, my main concern is to protect against insects. Squirrels are a different problem. I deal with them in another way.

Unlike @Auburn, my spraying with Surround did not give the protection I need for soft skin fruit like peaches. Insects like OFM, PC and stinkbugs got them anyway. (It could be the timing was off or the thickness of Surround was not enough). I did not want to risk it again this year so I spray with insecticide until fruit are big enough to bag.

I did not have to worry about bagging pears until last year when stinkbugs did quite a damage on the fruit.

Bagging are tedious and time consuming esp. when one works full time and has to run a househod. It has taken me several days now and only get about 50% done. The insecticide sprays do allow me to take time to bag.

Surround cannot be use with sticker. We have had so much and so often rain this spring. I would have to spray Surround every week to get some cover.

I donā€™t trust that two sprays of insecticide will do the job against all those insects. I honestly think from the number of hits over time that I have seen possibly 4-5 sprays may be needed. I do not want to spray that much. So, bagging is my option.

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Squirrels go right through the plastic bags to get the fruit

I have maybe 400 apples bagged on my Gala tree, even tho Iā€™ve thinned and thinned

Iā€™m getting some drops with the apricots now, but they could use some thinning. Usually, I find PC marks on the drops, but not this year. So far.

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I used organza bags and white cotton bags on grapes (during two years) the birds pecked right through them. Bags all over the ground!

Iā€™m a fan of bagging apples, after having a successful experience last year, when I bagged 900 of them. It worked great! I used the cheapest store-brand Ziplock-type bags I could find.

This year I have a smaller fruit set. Thus far Iā€™ve bagged just under 380 apples. Itā€™s not work to me; I find it very relaxing.

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I have bagged some pears and peaches. Itā€™s too late for apple and every one of them have a bite, next year I need another measure to deal with it.

I missed the last few replies on this thread.
Mamuang and olpea: do you think my peach fruit drop is caused by something other than ā€œJune dropā€?
I got more fruit on the ground than on the tree.

I only have five peach trees, but Iā€™ve never had Peaches in my June drop category, only plums.

Last year I had very littleā€¦ most I guess I must have thinned. I will say my only exception was my peach that I donā€™t do anything with. It was sold to me as an Elberta and other than last season hadnā€™t flowered or done ANYTHING in 5 years. It finally started taking off last season with some good growth. It flowered in the spring and set a good crop. I thinned pretty heavily in May of last year and by the end of June EVERY peach had dropped off the tree. They had all grown about the size of a 50 cent piece and just fell. I cut open about 10 of them to see if there was an issue. Skin perfect, not a single bite, flesh still green, pit still soft but whiteā€¦ so in other words not a thing wrong with those 10. So I havenā€™t a clue but this year it has set and set really heavy so again I thinned to about 1-2 peaches per branch. Right not they are almost the size they were when they dropped last year so I will have to monitor.

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Have you cut the drops open to see if theyā€™re infested?

Sorry, thought the reply was to me

No, now that you mention it, I will.