Re: Cleary's 3336, again.......

I use a gallon pump sprayer or a three gallon pump backpack sprayer depending on how much I need. I do not think hose end sprayers or siphon sprayers are a good idea for orchids and most chemicals for lots of reasons, some learned the hard way.

Pat

Does your gallon sprayer have a hose and spray wand or is the spray nozzle attached to the top of the tank? If you have a hose, I think you should try a batch in your sprayer anyway. I have nearly as many plants as you, and I spray them with Cleary's in the summer (outside). I use a

Steve

Diana, Just so we are using the same terms, you are not doing a drench just a spraying. A drench is when you want to get the chemical down to the roots and requires you saturate the mix with the chemical. With a spraying you are spraying the leaves with a fine mist just to the point the chemical starts to run off the leaves. Depending on a lot of things I would guess I can spray 300 to 500 square feet of orchids with a gallon of spray. I can drench maybe 30 square feet with a gallon.

Try a sprayer, you will be surprise how fast it goes. It is safer, you will use much less spray, you will be exposed to the unmixed chemical less (remember the unmixed chemical is something like 700 times more toxic that the spray), the mix will be much more accurate(!!!), as Steve points out you can focus on the plant being sprayed, and you will get better coverage. The more accurate mix is reason alone not to use the hose end thing.

I once attended a demo where plants were sprayed with a UV mix with various sprayers. After the spray dried, a black light was used to show how well the sprayer covered the plant. The hose end sprayer gave the worst coverage and used the most spray.

My sprayers of choice are Solo (both pumpup and backpack). Avoid the cheap ones, they do not make a good spay pattern and are just junk.

Pat

Diana: Unfortunately I do not recall where it came from, but I used a

Before that I had a 2-gallon "no-pump" sprayer (Scotty's Hardware, I think). No pump was a bit of an exaggeration (sp?), but it did pressurize itself while filling, so there was a lot less pumping.

Kenni

Diana,

If you have already bought a sprayer, just skip this post.

Ok you still reading? Stainless sprayers are great for someone who wants to use a single sprayer for everything. They can be cleaned. Herbicides, especially 2,4-D, are very hard to completely get out of plastic. No matter how well you clean a plastic tank that has been used with some herbicides, the next time you use the sprayer on sensitive plants you may see damage. Around here we never use a sprayer on the orchids that has been used for herbicides. In fact, Solo sprayers are used with the orchids and I never use a Solo sprayer with herbicides. So far this has worked and we have never had a mix up.

For the past year I have been using a 4.5 gallon Gilmore backpack that I bought from Lowes for herbicides. It was not cheap and seems flimsy, but has lasted the full season. Herbicides go down as small droplets to minimize drift so I can not say how well it works as a sprayer (but I am sure it works fine). As it came out of the box, I attached the herb nozzle and threw away the spray one.

If you already have two pump up sprayers and they were cleaned the last time they were used, I am sure they will work fine. With these sprayers, you get the finest spray when the tank is under the most pressure, so just remember to keep it pumped up. I find I like backpack sprayers best. Easier to keep the tank pumped up, easier to get around as I am spraying, and the spraying process just flows better. Last spring Costco had '4 gallon' Solo backpacks for cheap money, I think $70. (Although the box said 4 gallon they were really 3 gallon sprayers.) If you have the strength to repot orchids, you should be able to handle the backpack, it does not need to be filled to capacity. If you can not handle it, maybe you can get Frank to do the spraying. If Frank does the spraying, you will owe him. If you are not inclined to pay this debt, I have seen some very good battery powered sprayers at shows being used to mist exhibits.

Pat