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Following up on my previous post on pest control, Pest Control: A Prerequisite Course in Organic Gardening, I know as a fact that in some parts of the world, farmers put bags on those tiny apples when they thin out the clusters. By doing so, the apples are protected against weather, pests and even pesticides. Just a couple of weeks before harvest, the bags would be removed and the apples would turn red evenly and look beautiful. It had occurred to me that I might need to do the same, but somehow have just let weeks slip by without doing anything. Seeing that my apples are almost all lost to codling moths, I decided to bag the few apples that are left. As they say, Better late than never.
Searches for bags turned up some YouTube video and webpages about bagging apples using Ziploc bags. Wow, that’s just what I need!
So I set up my ladder and looked for good apples to bag. There were one or two that were absolutely clean and clear of any sign of damage. Yes, you read correctly. One or two, out of maybe two or three hundred apples that are still left on the trees!
Looks like it IS too late. And you know, man, it hurts. Badly. The dreams of eating those delicious organic apples from my own backyard! Oh, what a shame!
I had rejoiced in picking one little cucumber or a couple cherry tomatoes from my yard, congratulating myself on my first successful season of organic gardening! Oh how stupid of me! By neglecting my apple trees, I must have lost hundreds of dollars’ worth of apples! Those little apples have been falling dozens everyday day, probably hoping that they might somehow get my attention so that I could save their fellow apples! They fell everywhere! On the grass, on my cherry potatoes and cucumber plants! Even on my head! But I just ignored them.
Looking at those ugly apples, with holes, brownish excrements all over, deformed, I could not help but think of Zoombies. Say you know that some people have been bitten and have become zombies, but it hurts the most when you realize that some good friends of yours have been bitten and are turning into zombies. There are still others that you are not sure if they have been bitten or not. Or if they will actually turn into zoombies if they are just scratched. That’s what happens with my apples.
I know most of the apples are gone! They are lost to the larvae. When there is a hole on the apple, chances are they already left to pupate. If they had got to the core of the apple, the apple is done! It will just rot away and fall prematurely!
After bagging maybe a dozen good and not so good apples, I realized that that’s not the best thing to do. If I leave those uglier ones out there, codling moths are going to get them and it would be just as if I feed those apples to them. I could not do that. Finally, I decided to bag each and every of those apples that still look like apples. Just like those would-be zombies. You cannot kill your friends thinking that they must have been infected. You have to try all you can to save them.
So, I am going to
- bag those good apples, so that codling moths will no longer have access to them and will have to leave them alone;
- bag those not so good-looking ones, so that they would not be infested by codling moths, although they might have been infested with something else. By bagging them, there could be at least a chance that they will survive;
- bag those that were apparently infested with codling moths, as there was a hole, or there were brownish excrements. Doing so, I hope that when the larvae, if they are still inside the apples, want to move to other places to pupate, they will be trapped inside the bag, thus terminating its life cycle.
I will be monitoring those bagged apples very closely.
Update: It looks like you need to prick the bags or cut the corners of the plastic bag to drain rain water. But will codling moth larvae find their way in from those holes? We will see…
