Bagging of fruits/veggies: anybody do it?

[Gold Metal Flake]

A link from lwfern contained some info about paper bagging cukes on the vine to prevent boring worm infestation. I was wondering earlier this week about using some cloth bags to prevent critters from nibbling the wife's beloved beefsteaks. Just some cloth sewn into simple bags and tied on. Thoughts/experiences?

[Kolesar]

1. Gardeners put spun cloth "row covers" on the plants

This is to keep moths from laying eggs that grow into caterpillars. Bagging sounds like a sound concept, too.

[bvar22]

2. We will be experimenting with "bagging" next Spring.

Peaches will be our concern, but we haven't decided what type of bag we will use, or when we will bag them. ALL chem based pesticides are OUT, and all the locals say we will never get a peach without regular, heavy applications of pesticides. This year, the locals were right. We had a promising young crop, but none of them made it through July.
So next Spring we are going to bag about 20 peaches on our young trees.

We watched a special on PBS about Chinese agriculture, and there is a province where they have killed all the natural pollinaters, so they have stopped using all insecticides. They are pollinating their entire Pear crop by hand with little feather dusters, and bagging their entire crop.

[hippywife]

3. You been talking to my husband?

We're going to put in peach trees and have talked about having to bag individual fruits, too. haven't gotten any farther than that to research what to use, tho, since we haven't planted anything yet.

Do you think the early varieties will come to harvest okay without having to do this?

We miss having peaches and homemade peach jam so much. Sigh.

[NJCher]

4. I'd certainly do it

and am about ready to if that groundhog gets one more of my tomatoes. I have one plant where he's gotten every ripe tomato for the month of July. I've actually had to buy tomatoes because of him.

I've been spraying with a natural product and it's helping a lot.

What kind of bags would you use? Plastic? What?



Cher