So when do poppies wake up? At the crack of dawn? At a reasonable hour? Wouldn’t you know, just like people, some are early risers, and others like to sleep in. At 6:40 this morning I went out into the garden to get an answer to the nagging question. Some of the poppies were wide awake and ready to go. Others were still fast asleep, and others starting to stir. So when do poppies wake up? It depends on the poppy.
And some poppies have rushed through the whole flowering thing are merrily into the being pregnant thing. There is no one way to do things in nature. It’s every poppy to itself.
And what do we have here? These are fruit ripening bags specifically for Kosui and Hosui, reddish varieties of nashi or Asian pears. The way they work is that you place the bags over developing fruit and the bags do the following marvelous things:
- Protect the developing fruit from damage caused by leaves, branches, and other fruit rubbing against it
- Protect the developing fruit from birds and insects
- Protect the developing fruit from disease causing bacteria and fungi
- Regulate the amount of sunlight the fruit get so that you get beautiful fruit
The bags sound indispensable. I bagged about half of the developing fruit on our nashi tree and will see if they are indeed as marvelous as they claim to be. The bags have a built in twist tie making it easy to fasten around the stem.
Like any product it comes with plenty of warnings, such as don’t let small children put them in their mouths, don’t stab yourself with the metal twist ties, the bags are flammable so keep them away from flames, you know, all the things we are all tempted to do with new products.
There are fruit specific bags for various apples, peaches, grapes, tangerines, and on and on. And not surprisingly the label asks the user to refrain from keeping bags you buy this year to use on next year’s crop as the efficiency of the bags diminishes over time.
Are the fruit bags made of paper? I tried something similar with my apples using plastic sandwich bags after reading Ciscoe Morris’s column in the Seattle Times. http://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/bag-your-apples-to-keep-maggots-and-codling-moths-away/
It seems like you would end up with steamed apples, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case. Also, I love the pregnant poppy pic. Weren’t you tempted to draw in a face?
The bags are paper. They are used extensively in orchards in Japan. Farmers in Japan started making paraffin coated paper bags to protect Asian pears from disease in 1915. In the 1970s development of these waxed paper bags took off and the bags are designed to go on easily so that workers can bag up to 300 fruit in an hour. Extensive research and testing by companies that manufacture these protective bags has resulted in bags developed for many varieties of fruits.