North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Stefan Brandle <sbrandle@css.tayloru.edu>]

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