The critical problem with growing fruit trees anywhere is always going to be sunburn.
Ed Laivo, with Dave Wilson Nursery, we revisit, treating sunburn on a fruit tree. This is sunburn damage right here. Very, very important consideration for this time of the year or for the hot time of the year, sowhat we’re going to illustrate how you deal with sunburn once you have it and in the same, at the same time, we’re also going to illustrate how you take and prevent it. We’ll take a quick look at what typical sunburn damage looks like and first thing you do is clean out and expose the dead tissue. What you do is, you clean it back until you find the tissue that’s healed itself. We’ll go ahead and treat that sunburn damage by painting the tree with an interior latex paint. Always an interior latex paint, never an oil based paint, never an exterior latex paint because it has a fungus side in it and I’m choosing a light green.
You can choose any color that has nice, vibrant, reflective qualities. So you want it to be bright and in this case we’re going to use green because we’re going to paint this trunk of the Flavor Grenade Pluot which is very wonderful Pluot, kind of a green, yellow color. So this might be appropriate for that. We mix the paint up a little bit here, we’re going to mix it half and half, with water so, we’ll put just a little bi of paint in the bucket, doesn’t have to be a lot. Let it nice and, nice and mixed up there. We’re putting this paint on to help of course protect some of the damaging heat rays of the sun but at the same time, we’re also putting it on because I will help to keep worms from penetrating into this damage tissue which bores love.
So in most cases, what we would do is we would let this dry out completely but in this case, for the sake of demonstration, we’re not going to do that. We’re just going to paint. Go ahead and get, get it on nice and liberally. Stark white doesn’t need to be the color that you use all the time. Just having reflective qualities helps a bunch. Just make sure you get all of the, all of the tree covered nice and thoroughly, into all the cracks especially anything facing the south, the southwest. Any part of the tree that’s faced, that’s exposed going to south-southwest needs to be painted. Alright now on this pea tree, what we’re doing is we’re going to, this bigger pea tree, so we’re going to take away this spray bar and you take a funnel and mix up your paint with your fifty percent water. You want to put the, run the paint through a cheesecloth so you kind of get the, any of the larger particles out so that it doesn’t clog up. And then you just go ahead and you apply it liberally to the side to the trunk of the tree again, all the way up to the canopy and this is a quick way of doing older trees.
