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January 6, 2020 at 4:10 pm #1371
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ParticipantJapanese-style Apple Bags (PDF of archived thread)
August 23, 2024 at 1:53 pm #1947Brittany Kordick
ParticipantThe apple bagging trials continue and it’s become my tradition to offer an update of sorts annually, so here goes:
Unfortunately, the price of Clemson’s apple bags went up precipitously this year. It is now $200/1,000 bags vs. $150/1,000 in previous years, and shipping is limited to individual boxes at $20/1,000; unfortunately, they are not willing to go outside the parameters of their online setup to do bulk shipping (for example, if we order 10,000 bags, we will receive them in 10 little boxes at $20 a pop for shipping). On principle we had a really hard time ordering any at all given these changes, but are still unable to find any other source for fruit bags. I hemmed and hawed and procrastinated some more, and finally gave in and ordered 1,000 bags in May, which was way late, didn’t do much for us, but kept the trial going anyway for another year anyway.
Because I waited so long to order, this year’s experimental twist ended up being, what happens if you bag your fruit later than you should? I decided to run with it and necessarily bagged a month later than I had in previous years and did not bother doing any kind of sanitation spray step before bagging. There’s a lot going on right after petalfall and I figured it’s worth knowing whether late, lazy bagging will do anything for you. However, as usual, I did choose the most pristine fruits to bag and thinned appropriately. I knew that the fruits had likely been exposed to pathogens, even if development was not yet visible to the naked eye, but hoped that I would still be significantly limiting overall exposure. The good news: my bagging technique has really improved. Not only am I very efficient (typically, it takes me less than 10 seconds to bag a fruit, sometimes as few as 5), but as I monitored the bags over the next couple of months for drop-off due to poor technique, it was almost zero for 1,000 bags; the suckers stay on if you bag well. So I’ve got the practical aspect of bagging down: yes, it can be done, and efficiently. I just need to train a few more bodies to be as capable and enthusiastic as I am about it if I really want to ramp this up on a truly commercial scale.
Unfortunately, the results of late bagging are in, and guess what? Don’t do it. Over the several varieties that I bagged, I lost most of the fruits (dropped off into the still-attached bags). I suspect that, since they likely had built up some pathogen populations on the fruit surface by the time I bagged, the bags created an ideal environment for what was already there to thrive and may have exacerbated infection. So, unsurprisingly, the lesson is, yes, put your bags on in a timely manner, ideally only a couple of weeks after petal fall, when the fruitlets are 3/4 inch in diameter (basically, bag as early as you can — you do need to wait for the fruitlets to size up enough that it’s possible to bag). Also, do a sanitation step just prior to bagging — you want your fruitlets going into the bags clean, so they stay clean as the season progresses.
We’ve been telling many of our homeowner customers about bagging, knowing that most are not interested in keeping up with any kind of spray program. I was delighted recently to receive an email from someone who has a Fuji semi-dwarf tree in her yard, doesn’t spray or do much of anything beyond pruning, and had never gotten more than a handful of worthwhile fruits from her trees after years of hoping. She got some Clemson bags this season and wrote to tell me that she finally got to enjoy some fruit this year and that she didn’t see a speck of insect or disease damage on her bagged apples. She did mention that she still experienced some animal predation in the bagged fruits.
Which leads me to the next update: in the past, I’ve also touted the bags as protecting against deer damage, not as a result of personal experience (our orchards are entirely deer fenced), but due to hearing other apple baggers claim deer protection as an apple bagging virtue. Coincidentally, I must now concur with our homeowner friend that I don’t see the bags protecting against animal predation (but come on, you get disease, insect, sun, hail protection in one fell swoop — what more do you want?!). A doe got into our orchard a month or so ago and, not only did she tear into a bunch of my bagged fruit, she actually seemed to prefer it! She left unbagged apples alone and went for the bagged ones in the same tree; I actually watched her do this. No clue what the appeal could be, or if this is one strange deer’s fetish (suspect not, but who knows).
Finally, one last nugget of info gleaned this season: when I found out the Clemson bags had gone up in price, I did my usual exhaustive sweep, looking ways to procure fruit bags from other sources. No luck on paper bags, but I remembered that we had a box of “Maggot Barrier” bags laying around from years ago. These are domestically produced hosiery style bags from a small Massachusetts company: http://www.maggotbarriers.com. I’d never seriously considered them as an alternative to the paper fruit bags, assuming they would not protect against disease, just insect pests (they certainly do not claim to protect against pathogens, and I just assumed they would be too porous to do so). Well, I decided to put out what we had (equally late and not subject to sanitation spray) and I was encouraged enough by how easily and efficiently they went onto the fruits (I did a loose square knot, rather than the recommended rubber bands, and found that it took a little bit longer than paper bagging, but not much). I also loved that they were produced domestically and that they could be reused for more than a single season (you would definitely want to wash and sanitize them, though). I very nearly purchased a bunch more to use, but thankfully, managed to restrain myself to the small 100 bag trial I could manage with what I had on hand.
So the Maggot Barrier bags worked great for insects, but as expected, not so much for disease prevention (or at least sooty blotch/fly speck — full disclosure, I have not harvested enough of the Maggot Barrier-ed fruits yet to give a comprehensive report on whether or not they prevented other pathogen development). I will amend this post if I find that they did in fact, prevent a lot of fruit rot from occurring, but pre-harvest sampling of a few fruits proved that SBFS can waltz right through the fabric and thrive, no problem. Keep in mind that the fabric stays tight against the fruitlet as it grows, and that the fabric retains moisture, perhaps to a greater extent than the paper bags do. But for those of you in cooler climates where fruit rots are not the big bad that they are for those of us growing down South, perhaps Maggot Barriers are a good option for insect damage prevention.
Anyway, while all this was fresh in mind, wanted to jot down what I had to offer so far this year. Viva la apple bags! I really hope I can find a better source for them going forward and don’t have to cottage industry this into my own paper bag startup company.
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