I tried some green mesh fruit bags from Amazon this year. The only thing it seemed to stop was coddling moths on Apples. On Plums, the plum curculio would sit on it and eventually bite through it. Same with peaches. And although it said it “might” help with brown rot, peaches inside the bags still got brown rot.
Anyone else had similar or better luck? Do i need bags that are real plastic to stop plum curculio?
You need to make sure the fruit is far enough away from the edge of the bag in order for them not to reach it
Hmm, I might need larger bags, then. With the size bag i have, it seems impossible to not have the fruit touching the bag when the plums get bigger.
The ones I bought a few years ago are 6" x 9". They’re large enough that around my peaches they can be situated to not touch the fruit’s surface, or at least not very much. I still had a few this year where PC was able to burrow through the bag but have had 20 or so early ones which were totally clean. And probably 100 more about to begin hitting ripe any day now, which are all also clean.
Can’t imagine how they’d help with brown rot though… The fungal spores would surely be considerably smaller than the gap in the mesh. FWIW though, plastic “sandwich” bags on apples results in far cleaner looking fruit for me. None or less flyspeck, sooty blotch, etc…
Tried them one year. Squirrels loved them. Pretty good for the bugs though.
I had the same results. Good against bugs but squirrels patiently waited until the fruit ripened and then tore it off.
Tore mine to shreds. Little bits of mesh all over. I think they were offended by attempt.
Oh certainly… They’re effective against insects but of zero value against squirrels or raccoons or similar.
Haha probably! My squirrels were more practical - just tore a hole and took the fruit. I was impressed how they patiently waited for it to ripen though.
I have 4x6 organza bags that work great on figs. When the fig sizes up and starts turning ripe color… i put them on and tie tightly.
A few days later when perfectly ripe… i have perfect figs.
Without those wasp, hornets, yellowjackets, jap beetles, etc will mess them up.
TNHunter
I’ve found that mesh bags help divert bugs to easier-to-eat apples on large productive trees, but that they will often still find a way to get in if you have bagged the only two apples on a newer tree.
I only spray for fungal diseases (although apparently I’m going to need to spray dormant oil for San Jose Scale now, too.) If I didn’t bag my fruit, I wouldn’t get any. It’s worth it, although very time consuming. This year I bagged about 2000 individual fruits while I was thinning fruit. I only did about a quarter of my pears. You have to start EARLY, like before Mother’s Day, or you will already have bugs in a lot of the fruit. I wondered if it was worth it, but then visited Home Orchard Education Center, where they don’t have a lot of volunteer time. They don’t bag or thin. They only spray (mostly with Surround clay). I was watching volunteers hurriedly sort apples into a good wheelbarrow and a bad wheelbarrow. They had more bad than good, and there’s absolutely no way they were catching all the damage in the good wheelbarrow. Sometimes the entry holes are very small, and the volunteers were not looking that closely.
Occasionally bagged apples will still be pecked on by birds (but less often) or damaged by sunscald. I do find fruit inside bags on the ground but they almost always fell because they had insect damage I didn’t notice when I bagged them. I take the fruit out for the goats or chickens to remove the worms from the orchard floor, and save the bags. I don’t really find the squirrels up in the tree stealing my fruit from a bag. Occasionally if I don’t pick up a bag from the ground when I first see it, when I go back something has been pecking or chewing on the bag. However, I’m pretty good about checking before and after work every day.
I use 6x9 and 6x10 for apples and peaches. Last year I used 4x6 for figs, blueberries, and strawberries (I didn’t use any of them this year due to time constraints.) These fruit get a lot of rodent and bird pressure here. Until I started overcrowding my strawberry beds it seemed like every strawberry had one hole in it. My back hurt from bending over looking under strawberry leaves for ripe ones, though so I may go back to thinner beds and bagging the fruit again next spring.
One more thing - it’s a royal pain to bag fruit in an unpruned semidwarf or standard tree. I have a couple trees I just haven’t maintained well enough and I end up bagging fruit around the lower and outside canopy.
Nice idea with the cup lid.
I bag the whole tree. It’s sort of effective against squirrels, surprisingly. This year I only have two pears, and on a whim I tried bagging them individually with mesh bags sold for reuse in the supermarket produce department (i.e., alternative to single-use plastic bags) just because that’s what I happen to have. A friend in Korea had mentioned that pears on the tree are individually wrapped in paper there. I don’t know what, exactly, the paper protects against; he was telling the story in a different context than fruit-growing. But it inspired me to experiment a bit.
Specifically, the pears he saw in Korea were wrapped in phone book pages. And the story was on the topic of “coincidence”: for some reason he joked to his wife, “I wonder if my mother’s name is on one of those pears?” He reached up and unwrapped one pear, and there was his mother’s name! Not the same person - it was from the New York City phone book, and his mom hadn’t lived in NYC - but the exact same name, and not a common name at all.
I use them and I’m not sure I will continue to. On my Williams pride apples the couple of apples that I got I covered but the mesh acted like a mini greenhouse and the apples got sun scald where there was poor leaf coverage. It’s also very tedious if you have a lot of fruit.
It’s an extremely small sample size, but, of the first 4 cherries my trees have produced, 2 were partially eaten by bugs (i guess). So i covered the remaining two in bags, one mesh, one ziplock, both worked. I will say that in a year or two when all 15 fruit trees are producing, bagging the fruit sounds pretty daunting.
Hundreds of messages regarding fruit bags:
https://growingfruit.org/t/re-evaluating-bagging-fruit
