[NAFEX] Apple bagging report from Minneapolis, MN (also pears and plums)
list at ginda.us
list at ginda.us
Thu Oct 28 23:39:28 EDT 2004
All these bagging reports are very exciting. If my apples ever flower,
I think I will give it a try. Thanks to your experience, I think I
will not try to bag my apricots.
Ginda
On Oct 28, 2004, at 11:31 PM, Nathan Torgerson wrote:
> This year I bagged apples on three different trees. These were fairly
> young semi-dwarf trees, the fourth fruit season for the Zestar and
> Fireside, the first year for the Honeycrisp (finally!).
>
> Bagging was completed on June 6th. (Zestar: 102 apples; Honeycrisp:
> 96; Fireside: 47). I used clear sandwich bags with twist ties. I
> averaged 60 apples an hour and thinned the tree to one apple per
> cluster while bagging. I left 6 apples unbagged on the Zestar and
> Honeycrisp as a control. After June drop was complete (June 25th), I
> had 17 bagged Firesides left, 62 Zestars, and 69 Honeycrisp. No
> spraying was done on any of the trees.
>
> During the summer, about a half dozen apple bags started to collect
> rain water inside the bags, so I cut holes in the corners of those
> bags.
>
> Zestar apples don't have a very long stem, so the twist tie is
> sitting tight against the apple by harvest time.
>
> At Harvest, there were a few apples that had been attacked by birds.
> The Zestar bagged apples were 80% blemish free. There were 2 that
> definitely looked like apple maggots (must have got to the apples
> before I got them bagged. One apple was being occupied by ants. (I
> must have tied the twist-tie a little too loose on a few of them.)
> The Zestar control apples were seriously malformed by apple maggots.
>
> The Honeycrisp apples were about 90% blemish free. On this tree, the
> control apples were fairly clean too, only one had apple maggots.
>
> The fireside tree itself wasn't doing so hot, so I replaced it with a
> new one, replanting it outside the deer fence. I got four good apples
> off of it, with the rest disappearing, bags and all.
>
> The Zestar apples may have been picked a few days later than they
> should have been(September 1st, after half of them fell off the tree
> the night before), but they stored well for 1 month at 32 deg and were
> fairly high quality. A few showed some signs of wrinkling after a
> couple weeks of storage.
>
> The Honeycrisp apples have been storing well so far and have also
> been high quality, though some of the apples (20%) were a little
> small.
>
> Just for kicks, I bagged a few Luscious pears (3 out of 20) and
> Superior plums (3 out of 15). I planted these trees last year...they
> are about 7 feet tall. The plums did not liked to be
> bagged, All three of them split and they didn't seem to ripen as
> fast. The pears did just fine, and they ripened 3-5 days earlier than
> the unbagged pears. All of my pears, bagged and unbagged, were blemish
> free.
>
> Overall a good year, looking forward to seeing if I thinned the trees
> enough to have a good crop next year!
>
> Nate Torgerson, Zone 4, Andover, MN
>
>
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