[inaudible] My summer project has me doing a
lot of small batch spraying roughly 10 gallons at a
time of each mix, which would be more than
challenging with the 40 gallon tank because there's so much
gets trapped at the bottom and sort of a pain.
So I went out and got a 25 gallon
Pimco, which you can see here on the back
of my tracker and I'm sharing lessons learned. And
one of the things that just came as an epiphany
to me one day is the small Pimco's uh,
they don't come with hitches or anything, They give
you a sprayer and they're good luck with that and
they expect you to stick it on the back or
the front of your four wheeler. I don't have
a four wheeler, not like that. But that
carry all is a $50 item from Tractor Supply, not
Tractor Supply, Harbor Freight. It fits into a standard
two inch receiver hitch, which I have one for
the tractor plus it also fits in on the back
of my car. So if I ever had to
hold something I didn't want in the car, I
could put it out there. So it's a really
handy thing and it's very affordable. It takes you
less than an hour to put together and you've got
a really good tool. First thing I would say
though, is when you put it together, they
have you put it and set, it up so
that the nuts are on the inside where they'll gouge
the tank, put it to the heads of the
bolts on the inside and the nuts on the outside
and you'll save your tank. So anyway you can
see there's the tank about half full and I actually
measure with graduated buckets. For I measured 10 gallons because
the markings on the sides of these things are lousy,
they are not measuring cups. So I'm trying
to get repeatable accuracy for the concentrations of what I'm
working with. You can see my two jugs in
the foreground. The garage is my loading area and
it's also where I store the pesticides. I do
not have any restricted use pesticides so it's mostly to
keep them from freezing and then I can keep the
M. S. D. S. Sheets and
everything in one spot. Come on. Oh this
worked a moment ago. There we are. There again
you can see how the tank fits in there.
You'll see, I also have a small little
prop underneath the tank because it wants to wobble across
the center spar. Um The next thing I
found that made things a lot easier was you're, I'm measuring
a 1% dilution which is really close to 1.3 fluid
ounces per gallon since we're imperial. And that's these
pre marks on here as a 1%. Okay so
I have one at 13 and one in 26.
Now this is a translucent measuring cup and I'm loving
it because I know am I mixing for 10 gallons
or 20 gallons. So I know my batch size
and when I fill, I can look down into
the cup and see the tick marks on the inside.
So then when I pour, I pour to
the tick mark, it makes it really brain dead,
for precision. Doing 10 gallons, I need 1%.
I pour to the 10 gallon mark. So
that really has simplified things a lot. So when
I pour into the sprayer, I use the spray
wand to rinse out the cup back into the sprayer.
This is Regalia®, it's really thick, It's
not very clear, so it needs a good rinse
to get it out of the measuring cup into the
tank. Now when I'm spraying my trees are marked
um the sample trees are marked with orange flagging tape.
These are the trees that at the end of
it all I'm gonna be taking measurements from and it's
so I remember and they were selected for their health
and things like that. So these are the sample
trees for each row. Better picture the ones with
the checkered flags on them are the control trees.
They don't get the sprays that I'm using on the
sample trees, they get cover sprays. So if
I need an insecticide on, I'll do that.
If I've got an issue with rampant disease of one
kind or another, they might get a coat for
that. But otherwise they are not getting sprays,
they are getting full ear feeds also. So they
are marked according now, you know, so I've
got a tape. Something obvious on the high wire,
something obvious on the low wire, something in
the tree. Something low. The reason for this
is when you're spraying is easy to kind of zone
out and not realize you're coming up on a control
tree. So as I approach each row I stop
and I look for those flags. So that reminds
me watch your drift and don't spray these trees also
at the beginning of each row they have flag.
Now you'll notice back on these, I've got orange,
black and black, white. I'm doing two
different treatments. So the rows are flagged to reflect
the treatment that I'm using that way I don't space
out and spray the wrong road. They're alternating rows
with alternating variety. So there's a reason to my
madness here. So that really helps with something after
this. No that is in a nutshell, how
I am managing the workflow of doing the sprays um
mixing the sprays um Using a smaller container that pimco
sprayer does not have a decent pressure regulator on it
but it's good enough. It's a demand pump so
that it's what I do is I run the agitator
which is just a full bypass. I run that
until I get to the orchard after you get in
my orchard you're agitated. It's agitated. It's all
mixed up. I don't have any dissolved solids.
There's no edible powders in here so I don't have
to worry about settling. So as soon as I
get to the orchard I turn off the bypass and
then I'm getting roughly 60 P. S. I
sometimes I will throttle it back a little bit especially
if it's windy because I don't want drift and I
just use a tip that gives me big spots and
it gets on the tree. Um Those of you
familiar with sprayers you get it on that bigger tank.
I have a pressure regulator. Different video and
that's very helpful for constant pressure and running the agitator
simultaneously. So I hope that you find this useful
if you're doing small plots for some reason and you're
looking for ways to make it easier here. It's
simple, easier look at that to do your sprays.
Um This is what I found help putting the
tick marks on the on the measuring cup for volume
at 1%. So totally helps a lot especially because
it's translucent. That was a big win. So
I hope you enjoy this. I hope it helps
you out and you take care of the day