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  • From: Stefan Brandle <sbrandle@css.tayloru.edu>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [NAFEX] of sandwich bags and apples
  • Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 10:05:11 -0500

Bagging with sandwich bags sounds interesting. Perhaps impractical for large plantings -- as Tom Olenio pointed out -- and maybe a lost cause in Indiana -- I'm aware of Ed Fackler's cautions about the feasibility of organic growing here -- but the siren song is just so attractive. :-)

So I'm going to try giving it a shot with sandwich bags, paper bags, and the proverbial control group with nothing. Expect a report in September or thereabouts. If more people are willing to join in and someone with knowledge about how to do a study properly wants to give advice on what to do, that would be great. It is worth finding out whether this stuff is feasible for home growers in the midwest, as opposed to places with lower pest/disease pressure. The happy bagging stories seem to come from Oregon and such, but that may not transfer.

Elsewhere in the news, my lone nanking cherry -- it's buddy bowed out a couple years ago -- has been flowering up a storm, but no pollinator. I felt sorry for it (and perhaps just a hint of vested interest on my part) and planted another couple nanking cherries this week, so maybe next year we'll have something. My actinidia look much less like a cane forest and more like a real arbor after my pruning in early March. Now if the one male can just do his thing and the pollinators cooperate. The depressing thing is the deer. Last summer, I put fairly large plastic deer netting fences around a number of the trees and bushes. That really made a difference, but I ran out of time and supplies and didn't do everything. The ones that didn't get fenced got seriously munched. I think that our yard must be high on the deer's progressive dinner schedule. I keep wanting to do something crazy like put in an acre of hardwoods, but thoughts of the deer act as a significant deterrent.

-- sb






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