Thought this could be of use to some of you guys with larger amounts of trees. We got a tip a long time ago about using a airless paint sprayer to spray oil/fungicides/insecticides with, tried it and have been a believer ever since. We load the sprayer and a generator in the trailer behind the lawn tractor and can spray a amazing amount of trees in a short time. Today we sprayed 150 trees and went thru 15 gallons of spray in a little under 2 hours. Job done! So if you happen to have a airless sprayer sitting around consider using it.
Someday as the trees get further grown in we will likely switch over to a PTO driven 3 point sprayer with a boom to make it really quick and easy. But for today, this works just fine.
My trees are small and i can get by with a 4 gallon by with a back pack sprayer for a another year or two. The next upgrade wil be a 15-20 gallon tank pulled behind mu zero turn mower. I want to find a pump that i can run off of its 12 volt system. A good paint sprayer is expensive, but im sure the work great if you have one
We just happened to own one so it made sense to us. The real beauty of it is that the high pressure really breaks up the spray into a fine mist and covers very quickly and thoroughly. Much like you would want to do while painting. Makes for a fast efficient application without alot of waste or drip off. When I spray with one of my backpack sprayers it seems like more than half the spray runs back off whatever I am spraying due to the large droplet size coming out of the low pressure sprayer.
Pressure is adjustable by a knob. Doesnt really have a PSI setting. Not very high, maybe 1/3 of full pressure. Id have to look at what tip I was using. Honestly I have a few that ive tried and they all work pretty equally.
The coverage you get from the fine mist is perfect on all surfaces.
The beauty of it is that for those who only have a few trees they can mix the chosen materials in a 5 gallon bucket.
That is what I was using until my tree count went past 40 and as the espaliers started to fill out. I used a Wagner
( less tha $60.00 on sale at Lowes) hand held and instead of the quart screw on container I just ran a vynil hose to a 5 gallon bucket. Worked great. See below.
That’s when I switched to 16 and 25 gallon high pressue sprayers.
I had yet to prune a number of those in that picture. Once pruned they will be no taller than 7 ft. Im running behind on my pruning chores but needed to get the spray done as I have a few varieties that are breaking dormancy.
But as far as height being a problem with airless spray, its not hugely. We have a large 15’ tall apricot that was existing on the property when I bought it that I spray with this rig pretty successfully. The misting spray of this sprayer can go a long way.
