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Ginda writes
Well, I've been out of town, and I finally bagged my apples. It was
too late - every one was already damaged. I figured I'd go ahead and
try to prevent additional damage, and get some practice. I ended up
keeping 3 apples on one cultivar and 2 on the other, which is enough
to taste if they make it through the season.
Me:
The fluffy one was also delayed this year. In fact I started wrapping yesterday. I would say about 1 in 30 was okay…so that still leaves a whole lot of fruit for me to wrap in newspaper.
I use a pair of wire cutters to snip off the apples I do not want.
The primary damage to my crop if curculio and coddling moth. My experience for my conditions is that both forms of damage MAY be minimized. It seems you can scrape off recent curculio damage with you finger nail or a knife blade. The fruit seems to heal over fine.
And I have noticed that some coddling moths damage already seems to have exited the fruit on my trees, so you might bag or wrap any such examples just to see what happens.
Ginda writes:
I did learn that I can't wait until "cherry" size to bag. Next year,
I will try bagging the whole clusters as soon as they set, then un-
bag to thin and re-bag the remainder. Of course, the crab apples on
the same tree all look perfect.
My reply:
You could. You could also just blast the tree with a general purpose spray early on…maybe even two of them, and then go to bagging. It seems logical to me that if you start bagging at say ¼ size the residue has to be fairly minimal.
I have done that in the past…bagging around the first week of June after a couple of sprays and I have been very happy with the result in terms of time/benefit. I have to blast my plums about 2-4 times a season to get a full crop anyways so I hit the apples a time or two when I do it.
All the best…
The fluffy bunny
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