That sound like it. I mix mine to this ratio.
You have a 100 gallon sprayer or are you breaking down the 2 oz packs? â
The packets I buy are 2 pounds, =16 2oz water soluble bags. Makes 1600 gal. spray .
The product link I posted is a little confusing. Sorry about that. So it is 2 oz. equals 100 gallons. That is pretty cheap. $45 for 1,600 gallons.
Hi Johnnie,
My new orchard is going to be 70 tree strong by this coming spring. I have a feeling that my 4 gal backpack sprayer will be too small for it. What type of sprayer do you have?
ThanksâŚ
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Hmm,
It really depends on the concentrate of your spray. The max rate of captan 80 is 5 lbs.per acre. So at the max rate a 30 lb. bag will cover 6 acres. If one is spraying at 100 gal per acre (about 2x concentrate), then that would take 600 gal to cover 6 acres.
So, a $125 , 30 lb bag would mix 600 gal. So 300 gal would be half that, at roughly $62.
As you can see weâve made a lot of assumptions (rate of captan per acre, which according to the label has a wide variance, concentration of concentrate sprays - in other words 2X, 3X , 5X, etc).
If I were figuring on a per acre basis. I would calculate it as $20.83 per acre/application, which is pretty much consistent from year to year (at the max rate) from my experience. There are much more expensive materials currently labeled for use on specialty crops.
Indar has run roughly $12 per acre/application in the past, but it is much more expensive per bottle (over $300 per gal).
Propiconazole is cheaper still on a per acre basis, but the label allows fewer applications and it doesnât work as well as Indar.
Hence I am interested in tebuconazole (as jaypeedee mentioned) which may be another affordable option, as a replacement for one of these other azoles (DMIâs)
Price per gallon is what I was looking at. Have a pretty good idea how many gallons I use. The tebuconazole was looking real good in that respect. Iâm going to buy both tebuconazole and captan to alternate. Both were about $45 (small size) and should easily get me through more than a season.
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I manage home orchards in the Northeast and advice on fungicides is a very regional question and also affected by what stonefruit you are trying to protect, from varieties to species. I believe that pest pressure is significantly higher with commercial fruit production than in smaller home orchards for two reasons. 1: Higher tree populations close together encourage more pests and much quicker resistance development. 2: The need for absolutely pristine fruit.
I can only speak for areas within 100 miles of my own orchard, which is the region Iâm experienced with. Iâm about 40 miles north of NYC.
When I read Olpea suggesting weekly sprays to protect fruit it is like he is speaking from a different planet than the one where I protect peaches, plums and nectarines in about 100 home orchards. I use Indar and Pristine mixed with Captan at highest legal rates. Pristine and Indar are both registered for apples and I need materials I can use on both to simplify spraying these orchards, some of which only have a few trees and some more than a hundred of mixed varieties.
I havenât had to apply fungicides more than once for several years during summer to protect stonefruit from rot for anything but nectarines and even they may just need a shorter interval spray before harvest- 2 weeks instead of a month. Here are my spray guidelines for home orchards in my region.
Incidentally, vigorous plum and peach trees benefit from summer pruning as a cultural control to brown rot. Sun needs to reach the fruit and dry off dew and rain quickly. Moderate growth is the aim of orchard keepers once trees reach adequate productivity, but in the humid regions a lot depends on the soil in achieving the Goldilocks balance. Vigorous growing trees may have an advantage of being harder to kill, but their fruit tends to be harder to protect from diseases and nutrient deficiency disorders like corking and fruit rots in some types of apples. They may also be more susceptible to brown rot for stonefruit species. .
Donât see it either. I must have see another *conazole and confused it. Itâs really hard for me to keep very similar names straight sometimes.
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I do it the hard way, using 3-2gal. sprayers. I do have a 25gal. 12v unit but only use it to spray higher up in pear trees.
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I started out with about 70 trees in my backyard. I started out with pump up sprayers (backpack and hand held). Then went to a 25 gal. electric sprayer. Then went to a 60 electric pull behind sprayer. I kept getting bigger sprayers as my backyard orchard grew. A 60 gal seemed to work for the 70 trees as an electric sprayer.
A gas powered sprayer could do with with a smaller size. Thatâs because they can put out more pressure, so you get better canopy penetration with less water carrier. With the lower pressure of an electric sprayer, it requires a good soaking of the tree to get all the foliage (at least in my experience). That doesnât mean an electric sprayer requires more chemical, just more water as the carrier.
My airblast sprayer for my larger orchard is fan assisted, so it requires even less water as a carrier. Thatâs because the fan blows the mist much further into the tree canopy. It relies on the fan to blow the pesticide/water in the canopy verses wand sprayers which rely only on the force of the water coming out of the wand to penetrate the canopy.
Whatever sprayer you choose shouldnât impact the amount of chemical you use. Itâs just a time thing.
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Thanks Olpea for your feedback! I think I will have to stick with electric sprayers because my orchard is within 20â of two of my neighborsâ properties and I donât want any friction with them because of spray drift. How did you pull the 25 gal sprayer? with a lawn mower? Are there any manufacturers you recommend?
You can find 15 gallon electrics for about $100. Some pull behinds hook up to a mower depending on size. With 70 trees you could get away with the cheap 15 gal. but you will have to keep refilling it.
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Yes, with a lawnmower. My first 25 gal sprayer had a wheel kit on it and a little hitch to hook up to a lawn mower (ZTR mowers work best with this system, but any riding lawn mower should work).
My second 25 gal electric sprayer didnât have a wheel kit, so I pulled it with it inside a little lawn cart, like this:
The electric sprayers come with a pair of large alligator clips to hook to your battery, but I thought that was annoying, and not very secure or convenient. So I dove into the electrical system of my lawn mower and hooked/mounted a toggle switch on the mower which was powered via the mowerâs electrical system.
Then coming out of the toggle switch I hooked up a plug which was the mate to the plug on the sprayer pump. So, to spray, I just plug in the sprayer pump to the pigtail on the mower, flip a switch and the pump pressures up.
If you use this method, be wary that you use the female portion of the plug in on the mower. Unfortunately I used the male portion on the mower. Once, when my wife was mowing the toggle switch got turned on, and the male plug on the mower touched the frame of the mower, causing a direct short. It smoked some wires on the mower. I had to redo some of that wiring.
I fixed the problem. Rather than converting all my pumps to have a male plug, I kept the male plug on the mower, and simply fused the wire. So if the same series of unfortunate events happens again, it wonât smoke the wires. It will just blow a fuse.
Iâll try to take a picture, if I get time.
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Sprayer on the little trailer is my set up as well. I went a different route though. I wound up putting a battery in the cart with the sprayer. Placing on a charger when done.
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I think any tank will be fine, as long as the pump is good. I wouldnât recommend Fimco. They sell a lot of these type pumps, but their pumps wonât take oil at all. So if you do dormant oil sprays, count on rebuilding Fimco pumps. Thatâs because they use cheap EPDM rubber seals.
I called their factory and asked a tech about it. They will tell you the pump is not designed for hort oil. I rebuilt the pump a couple times before throwing it away and replacing it with one which had Viton seals. It was an expensive pump, but I was tired of rebuilding them.
There are less expensive pumps which have decent seals which hold up to hort oil. Just make sure you donât get one with EPDM seals.
Hereâs a pump which looks like it has Viton seals. Itâs quite a bit cheaper than the one I bought. I guess theyâve come down in price. This 5 gallon per minute pump is on the low end of volume but they work (I have a couple of 5 gal/min pumps on a couple sprayers.)
The other thing about Fimco is that they use pretty cheap stuff all the way around. Of course their pumps are cheap. Their hoses are cheap. Their fittings are cheap. The pressure gauges they use are cheap. Because of the continual water hammer of the pump, an air filled gage wonât last very long compared to a glycerin filled gauge. My gauges went out on two of my electric sprayers. I replaced them with liquid filled gages. There is the reason Fimco sprayers are the most inexpensive sprayers out there.
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I have some corrections. The pump I replaced on the 60 gal Fimco sprayer was not a 5 gal/min pump. It was only a 2.2 gal/min pump. I must have a 5 gal./min pump on one of my other sprayers.
Hereâs a pic.
It does have Viton seals, but the 2.2 gal/min flow rate is pretty low. It probably wouldnât work except I built a really long wand, so I can get the spray tip close to the canopy.
Thatâs the other thing I should have mentioned. The wands Fimco sells with their sprayers also suck.
Here is the toggle switch set up on my mower.
My mower had a blank spot on the console for a switch, so I just bought a switch that fit the blank. So it sort of looks factory like.
The other correction is that the connections on the pigtail are neither male nor female. You might call them a hermaphrodite plug. They have both parts. I had forgotten that. Thatâs why I didnât put the female end of the plug on the mower pigtail. The plugs arenât made that way. You can still wire the plugs so that the female part of the plug is the positive and the male end is the ground. That would also offer more protection. I think thatâs the part I confused with my post above. I didnât want to rewire all my pumps, so I put other protection measures in place, and left the male end positive on the mower pigtail.
Youâll notice there are two plugs in the picture. Thatâs because one of the plugs is a âdummyâ plug. In other words, it dead ends to nothing. I put that on the mower as an extra level of precaution, in addition to the fuse, so the wiring wouldnât burn up again (It really was a hassle redoing the wiring.) I plug the pigtail plug into the dummy plug when Iâm not using the sprayer.
Either a dummy plug or a fuse would probably be enough protection, but when you have to rewire a mower, you get a little OCD.
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Olpea, Thanks for all the tricks of the trade⌠I am sure I will go through my own learning curve, but hopefully avoid some of the caveats you alerted me of.
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brickseek showed these in stock here and they were⌠thank you! could you share your secret for finding this?
How do you reckon? Merivon appears to need to be reapplied if a heavy rain occurs as much as 3 days after application while Indar is rain-fast in about an hour after spraying. How many hobbyists can always quickly reapply spray after rain? How long of an unprotected interim is required to lose the war against BR for a season? For that matter, why does the label say 3 days after application- what if the deluge occurs 4 days later? Does Merivon become rainfast after 3 days?
How much of the rating system is based on the current state of developing resistance in commercial orchards and at what point should that concern hobbyists? How long does it take for an orchard with 1,000 peach trees to develop resistance to any given pesticide compared to an orchard with only 4? What about smaller isolated commercial orchards compared to regions with many such orchards?
The reason I keep interjecting here is that Iâm afraid that info important to a few commercial growers who participate in this forum may influence some hobbyists who believe the strategies used by both are based on the same needs. I have spent the last 30 years adjusting Cornell recommendations to create a method of pest control that requires a fraction of the applications used by commercial growers in my region. Iâve long since learned that how they rate a pesticide doesnât always jive with how it works in my operation although I still consider such info useful if taken with a grain of salt. I encourage home growers to follow my example- it is so much less taxing if you take some risk to find out the least spray approach possible at your site.
I canât afford to respray the orchards I manage after every rain and never seem to suffer consequences for not doing so- many seasons, many, many sites. When I can use pesticides with kick back and systemic traits (as do the SIâs like Indar), I do so. I also use the best sticker I can find for rain fastness and have considered that to be Tactic for quite a while.
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