Those hose sprayers are no good. Get a Solo backpack sprayer and you will get the misting you want and will be able to spray all your trees in one fill. If the trees are tall get an extension wand to reach the tops.

Scott

Thanks Scott.

Is the difference between the Solo backpack and the Solo handheld just capacity/convenience or are there other features I would get with the backpack that I would not get with a handheld?

OK, I'm going to totally disagree with Scott. I have over 50 fruit trees of various kinds, as well as a dozen grape vines, 17 blueberry bushes, currents, gooseberries, kiwis, raspberries, blackberries, etc.

Over the years, I've had MANY kinds of sprayers, various smaller tank kinds, including one on wheels, a Solo backpack sprayer, and a large, 50 gallon capacity gasoline powered sprayer with a trailer hitch to tow behind my lawnmower.

Guess what, they're all a pain in the rear! Small tank sprayers are too small, heavy to lug, and have to be refilled many times to do all of the plants. The backpack sprayer is great if you're young, strong, and muscular, but it too doesn't have much capacity. The tow-behind one is big, noisy, takes a lot of maintenance, and the hose is perpetually tangled in the wheels, no matter how carefully you try to wind it every time you move the thing from tree to tree.

I chucked the whole mess a few years back in favor of a little hose-end sprayer with a dial to adjust the application rates. I bought a couple of rolls of one inch black PVC water line, fittings, etc., and ran spiggots near all of my fruit and orchard areas in the yard. Then, I put hoses out there with quick-connects on the end. I now move quickly and effortlessly between areas and from tree to tree, carrying only my little one quart sized sprayer (which can make up to 64 gallons of spray from one fill of the jar, depending upon application rates of the chemical). The only other chore involved is winding and unwinding the hoses. I put in 15 spiggots in total, so the longest hose I need to have in any one spot is 100 feet, and most are only 50 feet. One of the best parts of this is the fact that it's totally silent, other then the sound of the spray coming out, so I can do it early in the morning when the wind is calm, something I certainly couldn't do with a gasoline powered sprayer towed behind a lawn tractor -- neighbors in my suburban area wouldn't appreciate that at six o'clock on a Sunday morning.

I just sprayed yesterday -- did all of my trees in under an hour, and about half of that was spent fixing some hoses that had holes in them or bad fittings (I used about 8 hose menders!).

And yes, there probably is one disadvantage in that the droplet size isn't nearly as fine as my tank sprayers can produce, so it does take more spray to compensate.

I haven't missed my tank sprayers at all -- they're sitting the shed unwanted and unloved. I do actually use the smaller sprayers for Roundup, since they do give more control than a hose-end sprayer. Haven't used the big, gasoline tow behind sprayer for several years.

As far as the brand, I prefer the 'Hudson Valley' hose-end sprayer with adjustable application-rate dial, because it has three spray patterns -- jet, shower, and fan. The Ortho sprayer only has one spray pattern, sort of half way between the shower and fan patterns, so it's not as versatile.

Dennis