Commercial Sprayers?

General Fruit Growing
#61

I’m surprised your sprayer will spray that high. I’ve owned two electric motor Fimco sprayers and neither one would spray near that high. They would spray about 10 high at the most. I ended up making my own 6’ long wand so that I can spray my backyard trees more easily.

It sounds like they have maybe improved the pumps on the pro model you got. The older pumps wouldn’t take spraying dormant oil (or even oils in emulsifiable concentrates). The oil would ruin the seals after a couple years. I got tired of rebuilding the pump every two years, so I bought a different pump with Viton seals for the current Fimco sprayer I use.

If the manual says it’s OK to use RV antifreeze, then it’s probably OK. But RV antifreeze has alcohol in it. Alcohol can be really rough on some seals, so I wouldn’t use it, unless the manual says it’s OK.

For winterizing our pumps, we pump all the water out that we can, an just run a very small amount of cheap automotive glycol anti-freeze through them. I save the old antifreeze I change from automobiles and orchard tractor and reuse that for winterizing spray pumps.

In terms of cleaning the tanks out, we never do, until the end of the season. If there is a little bit of spray left in the tank, I just use it as a dilute for the next batch of spray. As you get more experience, you’ll find you have less and less left over.

#62

Yes! It is! Totally overwhelming at times. I bought a house on 10 acres. I knew there were some fruit trees when I bought it. There were trees planted in clear rows - that looked like maybe apple - and at the time it looked like maybe 20 of them. I had always wanted to try some fruit trees so I signed up here and tried to decide how to proceed. Here’s my first post: 40 sad and neglected apple/pear/asian pear trees need your guidance! or should I get rid of them?

Since I don’t even know what I’ve got, I decided to wait on that. In the future, I may decide to “lower” some of the pear and apple trees, or top work them, or remove some to create space between them.

I am leaning strongly towards removing all the peach trees I have (they are between 12-16 years old and most are VERY TALL - 25 feet at least - with one ‘short’ one which is about 20’) and planting new peach trees.

For the first year, for all the trees, I decided to:

  1. Cut off dead branches and obvious crossing or really badly malformed branches.
  2. Take copious notes and pictures of each tree to try to figure out what they are, what problems they have, what diseases I need to treat
  3. Learn as much as I can about growing fruit from these and try out some of the things I will have to do (more pruning, spraying, thinning - if I get any fruit set, clearing weeds around bases of trees, etc.)

If I have to pick or thin this year I will be excited! I got a very long pole for attachments on recommendation of Clark, who has tall pear trees. So far, I have a saw attachment for pruning. It does seem that pears need less spraying and thinning than other fruits, which should help me in the distant future.

I do worry about not being able to see problems at the top of the trees, but I’m trying to proceed with one thing at a time.

@Olpea : Thanks for the tips! I was also surprised at how well this sprayer worked. I will keep updating with it’s long term performance. I would have liked a nicer sprayer like the one you described above, but I am going from 0 to 60+ fruit trees very suddenly and can’t afford it at this time.

In a few years, if I still have so many trees and things are going well, hopefully I can get something nicer.

I was interested in rinsing the sprayer because the manual says to do so. But the concern seems to be mainly the pump. I don’t know why I thought I had to rinse the tank! I should just take the hose end from the tank and stick it in a bucket of water to rinse the pump. I can’t believe I didn’t realize until just now!

Fortunately or unfortunately, So far I’ve had the opposite problem! I get to the end of the tank and there are 3 trees left! I do hope experience will help fix this.

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#63

It’s almost impossible to get perfectly match the amount of spray volume with the amount of trees to spray, but you get closer with more experience.

When I spray with the airblast sprayer, I start out spraying every other row (i.e. odd rows 1,3,5,7, etc). When I’m done spraying the odd rows, I go back and spray the even rows. That way, if I run out of spray before I’m finished, I have at least 1/2 of every tree sprayed, theoretically (Really it’s more than 1/2 because the spray blows farther through the tree than 1/2.)

Then the next time I spray, I start with the even rows to make sure the few sides of trees I missed the last time, get sprayed the next time, if that makes sense.

If you wanted, you could incorporate something like that, even with your backyard sprayer. If it just sounds too difficult (because of tree layout or whatever) then you might try spraying the outside trees first (whole trees) then spraying the trees more on the inside. That way if you run out of spray before you are finished, the unsprayed trees on the inside will typically have less insect damage. Just make sure you start with those trees you missed the next time you spray.

It’s documented most insects fly in the orchard from the outside, land on the outside trees and migrate toward the inside trees. The exception would be if you had a lot of plum curculio infection from the previous year and and allowed the fruit to drop with the larva in it. The larva will exit the fruit and pupate in the ground, where the fruit fell, so that the next year they will emerge right under the same tree.