By Kay Ledbetter
Maintaining a healthy landscape often requires application of plant health products. The key to these applications is a properly calibrated sprayer, said Dr. Casey Reynolds, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service state turfgrass specialist in College Station.
“It’s not uncommon when you are managing grasses, whether they are on athletic fields, home lawns or golf courses, that you get impacted by weeds, diseases or insects,” said Reynolds, speaking at a recent turf and landscape event in Dallas. “We all know one of the best ways to manage these is to maintain healthy turfgrass through proper mowing, fertilization, irrigation practices and plant selection.”
But, he said, inevitably there are going to be pests out there. One of the most fundamental things to managing those pests and applying control products is using a properly calibrated sprayer. There are various types of sprayers on the market, from boom-type sprayers to backpack sprayers to landscape skid sprayers, and each is calibrated differently.
“Sprayer calibration itself is very simple,” Reynolds said. “There are multiple ways to do it. I would encourage you to pick a method that works for you and stick with it. Every time you change things, you introduce potential for doubt and miscalibration. What’s important is that you have a known volume of solution and a known area to spray.”
He said for professionals in the landscaping market, efficiency is the name of the game when they have many lawns per day to treat.
“You want to know when you get out on the lawn, that if you are calibrated at 30 gallons per acre and you have a 30-gallon tank then you can spray 1 acre of turf. If that product goes out at 1 pint per acre, you put 1 pint in the tank and take off,” Reynolds said. “That’s the kind of confidence and efficiency we want to have in mind.”
When looking at a product label that says to apply 2 to 3 pints per acre in a spray volume of 20 to 260 gallons per acre, keep in mind that it is the spray volume that will impact the area sprayed. He said 40-50 gallons per acre is a commonly used spray volume that often fits a wide range of products.
“The higher you go, the fewer acres you can spray,” Reynolds said. “The main thing is to calibrate to a spray volume that is within the label and fits the lawns you have to manage. Depending on what product you apply, if thorough coverage is extremely important, you might want to bump the spray volume up and make sure you get really good coverage – but the trade-off is you can cover less acres and will have to fill the tank more often.”
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