How To Safely Spray Insecticide If you are a novice to growing fruit trees or bushes, you will have to learn how to safeguard them from insects. Many people do not like the idea of using pesticides, but it is quite problematic to prevent large numbers of insects descending on your crops without using them. There are various problems about the use of pesticides ranging from worrying about killing non-harmful insects to poisoning oneself with the insecticide that may stay on the fruit. In the rest of this article, we will strive to deal with your worries whether they be altruistic or selfish. Firstly, we will dispense with your concerns concerning poisoning yourself with the insecticide on your fruit. There is virtually no danger of poisoning yourself with contemporary insecticides, if you follow the instructions on the label. The insecticide will have a short to medium term life in the open air, so that if you spray at the time you are told to, it will have degenerated by the time you come to eat the fruit. You should always wash fruit immediately before eating it anyway. Hand-held spray guns are easy to fill with the right concentration of pesticide and, usually, water. They are easy to use and you can direct the spray precisely where you would like to. However, this is only good for use on bushes and dwarf trees. It is not a good idea to climb trees with one hand holding a sprayer. Therefore, if you spray mature fruit trees, you will have to use either a hose pipe or a power spray to distribute the pesticide. In the majority of these systems, you attach a bottle of the pesticide to the end of the hose and the water passing across the top of the bottle draws up some pesticide. This is a fairly good system, but is rather haphazard with regards to the concentration of the pesticide mix that you deliver to your fruit trees. These systems work best with a high water pressure, but in some areas water pressure is not constant and so neither is the concentration of pesticide. Therefore, you have to pay particular attention to the insecticide as you cannot warranty the water pressure from mains water pipes. Professional growers use power hoses to circumvent this difficulty. The amateur has to use wits in the kind of research into the characteristics of the chemicals, especially if the water pressure varies hugely.. Basically, you will require a pesticide that has a quite wide tolerance of safety and efficiency. These details will be on the container and so it is imperative to read the instructions carefully and follow them to the letter. You have to pay attention to the recommendations for your own safety too, because the concentration might rise and fall without notice. The thing to concentrate on whilst spraying is to cover the whole tree but without spraying any area two times, because that increases the chances of drip. Dripping not just wastes insecticide but it covers the region under the tree killing insects that might
not be harming your tree - collateral damage. This is very hard to do and will take practice. A few last suggestions. Dripping may also cause the pesticide to get drawn up into the tree by the roots. Be attentive to the direction of the wind, so strive to spray on a calm day. Most insecticides are lethal to fish, which is another reason to take the direction of the wind into account. Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on a number of topics, but is at present involved with the Home Ant Infestation. If you would like to know more, go over to our website at Bugs Infestation.