1. instructions from Spectracide grass and weed killer; spray it by flowers, trees, shrubs…
and MUCH further down: kills all green plants.
2. instructions from Ace polystyrene hand pump sprayer: place hose inside cap, screw down cap. Nowhere does it say you must use a wrench full torque to make this plastic cap go down tight enough [you have to warp it seriously] to hold the hose on.
I pressurize the thing, working at my usual spot on the paving by the garden gate and immediately it blows the hose right off, fountaining weedkiller straight up into the air, down across the gate—I instantly yell to Jane to look out and aim it up and over the gate until spent.
Jane took the piece of obnoxiousness back to the bench and used heavy tools to get the thing put together so it won’t spontaneously come apart while I went and showered head to foot to get rid of the weedkiller. We only got half the driveway done. I have a headache I attribute to irritation, not weedkiller, but I am annoyed, to say the least.
To say the least. ;D
I’d take the sprayer back and tell them what you think of it, maybe they’ll give you a better one.
That’s what they sell. Their brand. That’s the trouble: Ace used to be such a great store, my favorite, but they’ve gotten further and further from having hardware in bulk and more in nice little packets of piddling quantity…remember the quest after weedcloth pins? The batch I got from Ace turned out to handle 4 running feet of weedcloth. Who needs enough pins for 4 feet of weedcloth? We bought 2 bicycle pumps from them. Both broke on first use. We thought the first was a fluke. Wrong. They’re only for display. If you use them, they break. Plastic rules. And not even polystyrene, in that item.
The garden rake we got from them? The handle came off. Or the head did. Take your pick. Can we put it back? Probably. Should we have to? No.
The only thing we’ve gotten from them this last year that wasn’t a bust was bags of compost. They do good compost.
Definitely unacceptable in a sprayer. Weed killer is bad enough, but you could have had something really lethal in there. I hope you are going to return it.
I have a number of pump hand sprayers ranging from 1qt. to 2gal. that I have bought at Lowe’s &/or Home Depot.
Tools that don’t work are the worst!
For anyone interested in pest control, here’s my thoughts on macabee gopher traps versus the black box ones: macabee’s are smaller and can go down gopher holes without having to dig them bigger. Black box traps are a lot easier to set, and seem to kill cleaner. Nothing like pulling a trap with a pinned, injured, but living, gopher in it. So there’s my thoughts for now.
Luckly we have a Atwoods and a Orscheln’s farm stores in our town, great products and if they break, they’ll replace them with no questions. I’ve returned 2 axes and a wheel barrel to Orscheln’s this year.
Oh and both of the stores are Oklahoma based and Okie owned 🙂
Sorry you had such a rotten time – I hope you find a solution that’s less problematic.
Simple solution, pour the contents into an old Windex-type pump bottle that is about empty or your are throwing away. I put Seven dust into a Parmesan cheese shaker for my garden when needed.
I have a pesticide license and would imagine you don’t have a huge yard. For bigger applications buy a small pressure canister pump. 1.5 to 2.5 gal, and a bottle of Roundup.
Foliar (leaves) spray mixed 50/50 with water. Cut surface(shrub and tree stems)use straight just enough to coat surface. Roundup is nasty stuff, so a dab will do ya and a small bottle will last for years. You can also spray it around your house foundation and it will clear a 4-6″ path.
Thanks. We’re about 90′ x 50′, not counting the sides or back. A pressure cannister pump was what ‘sploded on me. Blew the hose off and became a fountain. We had two back in Oklahoma City (one for poison, one for fertilizer) that were no trouble at all…and then this one. What we were trying to do was kill weeds in a gravel driveway, not exactly a finesse operation. But I tried to fill the cannister next to the drive, in the back yard near the fish pond. Thank goodness it was rotated so the fountain arced across the fence into the driveway…right where Jane was, but fortunately not hitting her. I swear to you we are not ordinarily the Keystone Cops. We are used to doing things. But no more lightweight equipment. A cannister that comes apart is no savings.
My mistake. I thought you were using one on those bottles of herbicide with the narrow hose they advertise for home use.
If your sprayer blew apart like that it must be cheaply made. I have some 3.5 gal ones that have lasted almost a decade. I did buy a pack of replacement diaphragms for the pump, but other than that as long as it’s not clogged they work fine.
Xenophon, you talking about the concentrate? Yes, paint full-strength on cut stems (and figure to have to come back and do it again on privet and hackberry), but surely the dilution rate for foliar spraying is more like 1:30 than 1:1!
I don’t find a Windex-type spray bottle satisfactory, even for tiny applications, unless it is the type you can switch to “stream” instead of “spray.” The fine mist is too easy to blow onto something you don’t want to hurt. If you set the pump-canister to a very narrow fan, and just pump it up a few strokes, you get a sort of coarse spatter rather than a mist. that you can pretty well direct where you want (i.e. on to the poison ivy only) and not where you don’t.
An equal ratio of water and roundup works fine for most spraying and you don’t have to saturate the plant. About 70% leaf coverage should do it. I mainly use glyphosate- based products for foliar work.
Abigail, I’m always willing to admit when I was wrong. I was thinking of the generic equivalent I buy premixed in 30gal drums. The proper ratio of pure Roundup to water for woody/herbaceous plants is 3-4 oz per gal so 9-12 for a 3gal sprayer, sorry for the confusion.
lol, Xenophon, I think most of us householder types are a little intimidated by 30 gal drums of Roundup…wow, it’s hard to realize that stuff comes in biiiig tanks. Seriously, what is your opinion of, say, Spectracide weed killer, versus Roundup. I’ve always gotten Roundup. I got Spectracide because it had that nice friendly ‘don’t worry about your trees, shrubs and flowers with this stuff’ statement, and then I read the print way down the label that says ‘this kills all green plants’…not even in the same statement…and was a little disconcerted. I don’t view a label on a bottle of poison as something that should separate warnings too far from the sales pitch. I know it’s my responsibility to read the labels, even when confusing, but I struggle a bit in dimly lit stores, and under sunlight, there’s that microprint warning plain to see. I’m so glad I read it before I got further—like spraying it. Your statement about strength and application makes it a bit clearer how the two statements could co-exist.
As for the bath I took in weedkiller—some of you have expressed concern—it was mostly on my hands, none on my face, certainly not in my eyes (I wore glasses) and I washed the clothes AND the flipflops I was wearing. A farmer in a field gets worse, I fear, on a daily basis.
I specialize in killing exotic and invasive plants for the State Dept of Natural Resources. Well I did, it’s hard to be a State contractor for a broke State. Now it’s back to Archaeology, computer repair, painting houses, and hopefully wildland fire.
Read the label carefully, the key ingredient is glyphosate, and they are all pretty much do the same thing. Roundup is more reliable. The funny one is some say may cause blindness if gotten in eyes. The Chinese generic say Will cause blindness.
While they’re more expensive, the metal sprayers will last much longer. As a side note, I’d go to Ace’s website and put in a complaint about that sprayer, and you might add the other remarks as well about the piddling little stuff. My local Ace hardware is in an old building with wood floors that creak when you walk on therm, they have their items in bulk displayed in bins and you can buy loose hardware or prepackaged, the service is outstanding, and they also do repair work on most of the stuff they sell.
I have come across solutions like that where the instructions are inside the label. In other words, you have to peel back a portion of the label to see exactly what you need to do. That always bothers me because when I shop for those things, I’m also shopping for other things that I need to apply the solution and it certainly helps to know beforehand what I need to do, how much, etc.
CJ, glad the “bath” wasn’t an all over thing and you’re not wilting like a sprayed weed.
Well, the glyphosphate types are generally pretty safe for hemoglobin-powered rather than chlorophyllous life. Although that blindness warning of Xenophon’s is sobering.
Most of those peel-labels can be peeled and restuck in the store, and I always do so if considering a new thing to purchase. Microprint in poor light is a problem, though.
Also sobering is the sheer number of these poisons gleefully pushed at the clueless homeowner, who is likely to figure that if one ounce is good, two is better. That aisle in Lowe’s gives me a literal headache to walk down. And our municipal waste treatment staff hate it. They test water around the watershed. The problem isn’t the runoff from parsimonious farmers’ fields. It’s the city storm drains with all the excess from well-off clueless city-types, who are basically pouring thousands of dollars of chemicals down the gutters. (Even without occasional sprayer-bomb accidents)
Yep, one reason we want to go to total weedcloth and mulch is never to have to use one of these products again. If we can just get the front under control, we get weed cloth, deep mulch, and after that you can hand-pull, easily, anything that takes root. So we hope for cooler weather….
We used to spray the fields with Round Up before planting around 5000 mums. Needless to say we used a tractor to pull the sprayer. However sometimes later in the summer we would get a lot of weeds between the rows. (Seemed to depend on when the adjacent field got hayed.) We rigged up a 2gal sprayer with a thin hose (I think we took it from fish tank equipment.) which we taped to the sprayer nozzle with duck tape. At the end of the tube we saturated a tampon and dabbed the Round Up onto the plants. We used a dowel taped to the hose to make it easier to handle. Then we got *really* sophisticated and got a sprayer with a wand on it so all we had to fasten the tampon to the nozzle. I’m reminded of all this because I was out spraying sassafras using the stream adjustment. All was fine until a gust of wind came and got Round Up on a patch of creeping thyme. Every once in a while I seem to need relearn the lessons I should know! At least the thyme will grow back. 😉
Weedcloth and mulch is a much better solution, unless it’s sassafras which equals bull briar for tenacity!
We got the first rain since June last night! Now I’m really glad I strewed a lot of Preen about the front yard!