One of my favorite garden “cures” is placing a clear plastic sandwich bag around apples when they are young to protect them from insects and disease. It usually works great and impresses the heck out of people who see and eat the apples which are normally tough to grow without using bunches of organic or synthetic pesticides.
Unfortunately this year was different. Rebecca Koetter, the person who planted these trees and put the bags on the apples (on the University of Minnesota campus) discovered that birds may choose to ignore the bags. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, Asian lady beetles decided to get in on the fun!
Well, they may not have opposable thumbs, but birds are pretty darn clever about opening things…
Some insects lay their eggs in the flowers in Spring and you can't put bags over all those!! I use a pheromone trap in Spring which traps all the boy moths!