Citrus Tree Care – Lime paint (2 of 2)

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Sunday 21 June, 2015 by Uncle Spike

Painting the trees with slaked lime and copper sulphate takes time. I have to paint the trunk, from the dirt level, right up to the canopy. For many trees of the older trees (perhaps 40 years), that involves climbing up inside to reach all the branches – and it’s mostly the upper branches just before the leaf point where the lichen grow. This is a ‘medium sized’ tree, perhaps 30-35 years old.

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Ah yes, and here is the reason I do this.

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Whilst this one is quite open, many of the orange trees are actually a bit of a pain to do as they are low down with the canopy almost touching the floor – so a few hours spent scrambling on the floor to get at the branches.

Spiderwebs, bugs, plenty of dust; and potentially snoozing scorpions under the rocks… all good fun 🙂

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Even the ‘house garden’ gets the same treatment – in this picture, for example, we have a clementine tree, summer lemon, pear tree, and Maltese plum (and many others out of view). 

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Olive trees surround much of the farm, and some of these are pretty big, but at least they make a change from painting just the citrus trees!

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However, the vast majority of the trees are clementine and orange.

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It’s a long and somewhat tedious job, with 250 trees to paint, but it’s not hard graft like some jobs, although it’s continuous stretching, bending, walking, crawling etc. so pretty good exercise I would guess.

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BUT – for the first time, I had some help… This year, Uncle Baldrick, a good friend and frequent visitor from the UK, took a week off work and flew over to help out. Working 12 hour days together, we managed to finish the job in just over four days. Interesting how some friends always step up to the mark 🙂

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