Orchard Pest Breakthrough…with Ziploc Bags!

Perfect Florina apple

It feels like a miracle. Just look at the photo!

You may be thinking, what’s so miraculous about a plain ol’ apple, cut in half? 

Well, easy answer: there’s no yucky brown tracks inside the fruit—what we have here is a firm, crisp, homegrown apple.

When we moved to the country, for several years, my husband John and I happily raised gorgeous and tasty organic apples—and without spraying them with pesticides or fungicides. 

We had loads of them to feast on into winter, and gave away lots more to friends and family.

Then seven years ago, we found strange brown trails inside our apples—what we discovered was the apple maggot pest.

Here’s more about this Destructive pest and how it works in your orchard.

Every harvest after that, our apples were afflicted. The brown tracks weren’t so bad the first couple of years, if you weren’t too persnickety. But each harvest showed more and more damage in the fruit—the apple would be soft, and dimpled with little dots. Cutting one open, you’d find big, nasty brown spots and holes. 

They were completely inedible. 

John and I tried an organic remedy: nematodes you buy from the garden supply store. They weren’t cheap: about $40 for both a fall and spring application.

More info here about Good orchard management and nematodes.

Sadly, even after applying them for several seasons in a row, they just didn’t work: we had nothing but fruit full of brown stuff. For a while, I gave a bunch of damaged apples to my sister for her horses, but the fruit became so horrible even horses would turn up their noses!

Enter my orchard epiphany: to try a whole new orchard strategy. It involved dedicated spring tree pruning and summer fruit thinning, and something new. 

Covering the young, developing fruit. With sandwich-size Ziploc bags!

Newly harvested Florina apples, still in their protective “covers”

I didn’t come up with this Ziploc idea—I discovered it from a food gardening expert. And I resisted it for a while. I mean, what this world does not need is more plastic use!

But I’m absolutely delighted to say, It works!

John and I did our best to limit our apple production with the pruning and thinning, so we didn’t have the hundreds and hundreds of apples to deal with. I think we produced maybe 60 or 70 apples this year—so we didn’t even use up one package of Ziplocs. 

On through the apple harvest, we picked William’s Pride, Tsugaru, Akane and Red Gravenstein—the ones the bear didn’t get. And then our largest harvest, Florina! And each apple was as clean as a whistle. 

Apples right out of the plastic bags

Well, inside the fruit. 

The one downside to Ziplocs is that earwigs (creepy-crawly insects) sneak inside the bag, leaving little black bits behind—which I can only assume is earwig-poo. You can see the black bits in the enlarged photo above. 

The thing is, if you go organic with your fruits and veggie growing, you’re sure to see various pests.

But washing your apples takes care of that! 

Washed fruit ready for the fridge

Rinsing out the Ziplocs, we’re planning to use them again next summer. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about growing apples. Fingers crossed this strategy will work every year!

For more about our bear visitor, and other homesteady stories, c’mon over to Little Farm Writer!

Apple Pest Elimination

 If you’re trying to grow food organically, this post is for you!

Last fall, I talked about the The pest that’s ruined our apple crop six years in a row: the apple maggot. In my experience, apple maggot renders your apples pretty much inedible. And in spite of dedicated application of a pest eliminator for organic gardens—beneficial nematodes—the problem just got worse.

The nematodes were costing about $45, to apply twice a year. The application and extra watering needed also took many hours.

In October, after yet another disappointing harvest, my husband John and I came up with a new plan to see if we could actually grow yummy apples again.

Now, we’ve had our ups and downs with homesteady-type strategizing…it seems like this or that family issue or health setback or higher priority project will always knock our best-laid plans off track. But John and I were really determined to turn our apple crop around.

I posted our very Simple apple maggot elimination plan…

And I’m happy to say that for once, we stuck to our plan! Here’s what we did:

*A thorough apple tree pruning in late winter and early spring.

*Skipped the nematode plan entirely.

*Thinned our apples on time, in June.

And gritting our teeth, we employed the extra plastic and…

*Got out the Ziplocs!

Apples zipped up in Ziplocs

Now, each apple is (hopefully) safely enclosed in a bag.

Nature also gave us an unplanned assist, one good, one definitely not…

Our unplanted areas (I won’t call it a lawn, it’s just weeds!) have been filling with clover! I understand clover attracts the kind of tiny wasps that prey on apple maggot. So, it’s a wonderful development!

Now, the not-good: The bear I mentioned last month did his share of apple thinning on our Williams Pride tree. The lucky thing is, he didn’t hit the other trees. 

Our Akane apples, our first tree to harvest, will be ready around the first of September. I’ll give you a report then! 

If you have any strategies for managing orchard pests sustainably, I hope you’ll share…just visit me on my Web site !

Orchard Management, Part 2

Lots of bushy growth from late pruning

As I mentioned last week, John and I have slacked off on proper orchard care the last few years.

I’m not sure how it happened—sure, the weather didn’t always cooperate, and there were the usual family commitments, chicken care, or a million other chores that took precedence. But the fact remains, our apple trees were neglected.

We’d gotten behindhand in two basic ways: pruning and thinning.

Pruning is essential. Apple trees in our climate grow an insane amount each year; lots of our trees grow five or six feet each, with lots of bushy interior growth. Yearly pruning helps open up the middle of the tree—much easier when it comes to picking, for sure!

Pruning ideally should take place during the dormant season, when the tree hasn’t yet started its spring growth—in our area, February is recommended.

The problem is, we’ve gotten a fair number of northeasters in February, making it a challenge for even the hardiest of gardeners to get into the orchard!

But we can’t use wintry weather as an excuse. John and I have often not gotten around to pruning until as late as April. Or even May. And one spring, I think it was three years ago, we didn’t prune at all. The trees turned into monsters! And were that much harder to manage the following year.

Anyway, when you prune a tree in mid- to late spring, it only encourages the tree to grow even more. And you wind up with a bushy tree that is putting its energy into producing leaves, not high-quality fruit.

Pruning, as it happens, works in concert with thinning.  A bigger tree produces more blossoms, which in turn means more potential fruit. A smaller, neatly trimmed tree will naturally have less fruit set.

But you’ll still need to thin. Without it, you’ll generally wind up with a tree that will overbear one year, and the next, produce little or no fruit at all.

Thinning also will help you have larger, healthier fruit, instead of the smaller, even stunted fruit that you’ll often find on an overbearing tree. John and I have also erred in thinning way too late, in mid-summer instead of early June, when the tree has already put oodles of energy into hundreds of apples, instead of dozens.

The rule of thumb: thin your apples to keep about 5 inches between fruits. Apple trees will often set fruit in multiple clusters of three, four, five or even more apples per fruit spur. So make sure to select the most vigorous little fruit in the cluster, and remove the others.

Given this neglect, John and I have often wound up with overgrown, overbearing trees. Which has led me to suspect it may have something to do with our apple maggot problem. It seems to me that with less fruit to attract the maggot flies, Berryridge Farm won’t be such a target-rich environment.

As an aside, the same goes for the neighborhood bears! Without so much fruit at our place, maybe they’ll be less tempted to break down the fences and go on an eating binge.

Back to apple maggot: the photo below was taken the first year we found the damage. At the time, I thought it was terrible! Come to find out, these bits of brown were minor--many of our apples will now have brown tracks and some mushiness all the way through the interior. 

One chore you can do to help this fall: go through your orchard and pick up all the little fruits any tree dropped over the summer. That means less food for the maggot larvae that are living on the ground below the tree.

Years ago, I read about protecting your apples from this pest by diligently enclosing each and every apple in a Ziploc bag. At the time, I sorta cringed. All that plastic! All that time!

But as much as I don’t want to go the plastic route, I’m ready. It’ll certainly save money on buying nematodes. And maybe we’ll be able to reuse the bags.

To sum up, for our nine apple trees, here’s our plan for 2023:

1^st: We’ll prune in February, as orchardists recommend, to maintain smaller, less bushy trees.

2^nd : We’re going to take a pass on nematodes this fall. It’s been too dry to apply them, and soon it’ll be too cold. We’ll apply them only in spring and see how it goes.

3^rd : We’ll thin the fruit early—when the fruits are the diameter of a quarter—to give the tree a chance to put its energy into producing larger fruits, in smaller numbers.

Then we’ll bite the bullet and get out the Ziplocs!

Under New Management

William’s Pride apples, an early season variety

Orchard management, that is.

To be truthful, John and I haven’t been on top of our fruit tree care the last few years. 

But given this fall’s disappointing harvest, we’re resolved to step up our orchard game: getting back to basics and trying some new methods. The goal is to save time and even more importantly, money!

Our orchard story: For about six or seven years, John and I were happily raising loads of apples organically. We didn’t use sprays, fungicides or pesticides of any kind, not even any compounds that are approved for organic growing. 

It was wonderful to share beautiful, organic apples with everyone we knew. Including my sister's three horses!

Then the apple maggot pestilence found Berryridge Farm. If you haven’t heard of apple maggot, it’s a pest that ruins apples. The flies lay eggs on the outside of the developing fruit in the spring. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which bores into the apples and leaves nasty brown tracks inside.

And at our place, despite our healthy-looking trees, the last five years or so it’s been one crummy harvest after another. The apples don’t look all that bad, dimpled with innocuous-looking little dots. Yet inside the apple, leading from each dot, lies yucky brown disaster. 

John and I tend to be glass half-full kind of food gardeners. No matter how poorly a crop turns out, we’ve always figured, “there’s always next year.”

But I’m losing hope with our mid-season apple trees.

What’s kept us in the apple game at all is that we have a couple of early apple varieties that are not affected by the maggot. I imagine the young apples are already developed enough—perhaps past a certain vulnerability—by the time the apple maggot flies start laying eggs. 

But our later-season apples, especially the yummiest variety at our place, the Honeycrisp…well, Blech!

For sure, hard-won wisdom has taught us not to pick an apple and just bite into it! We’ve learned to cut into every apple first and inspect it for damage. But for us, it's getting really old, producing only a couple of edible apples out of a tree full of them.

After two years of increasingly gross fruit, John and I heard about treating apple maggot with nematodes: ground-living microscopic organisms that, as we understand it, bore into the apple maggot larvae and devour them from the inside out.  

Given the cost, I wish you could just find these “insect-pathogenic” nematodes in nature, but you order them from gardening supply outfits. And although they come in a small packet of powdery-looking material, the powder contains “live” critters that you need to keep refrigerated. 

You mix the powder with water, and apply to the ground under the apple tree, in spring and fall. For our nine apple trees, a supply of nematodes runs about $45 with shipping. Doing the math for a twice-yearly application, that’s 90 bucks.

John and I were really optimistic—and we’ve been dedicated to the spring and fall nematode program ever since. And yet…

We’ve been using nematodes for three or four years, hundreds of dollars spent on nematodes, without a huge improvement in these infestations. And quite frankly, the financial outlay is starting to get to me!

Now, as I’ve talked about before, John and I long ago gave up on trying to get our food gardening efforts to pay for themselves. Meaning, investing so many dollars into producing certain fruits and vegetables, to save a commensurate amount at the grocery store.

Case in point: giving our hens insanely expensive organic feed, to produce eggs that will never pay for themselves…even when you factor in the fun of keeping hens at your place, and the pleasure of eating healthy, homegrown eggs.

Or buying seven organic tomato plants at $5.99 per pot—I think they went up to $6.99 this year—when in a chilly summer, your $42 investment has given you a couple dozen tomatoes. But there comes a point when you get the feeling that doing this year after year isn’t just impractical. It’s sorta…dumb.

Here’s the deal: I’m quite sure we have NOT gotten $90 worth of halfway decent apples each year since we started using nematodes. So I am ready, as the old saying goes, to stop throwing good money after bad. 

John and I are determined to soldier on growing apples…but we’ve decided to get back to basics, as I mentioned above. And pursue strategies that are cheaper than imported nematodes to manage our orchard. I’ll share next week, for my regular Thursday post!