so today we're painting Avocado trees and the reason that we're doing this is
we are protecting our trees from sunburn so this is basically sunscreen for your
Avocado. Now if you look at this stem of your avocado tree you can see it has
this beautiful green stem and this is a really healthy looking plant and it's
very susceptible to sunburn when it's this age because you can see it's quite
sparsely leafed it doesn't have a full canopy and it's not going to have a full
canopy of life to protect it until it's well established and about 2 or 3 years
old so young trees like this it is really important to protect them from
hot Summer Sun so as the weather is warming up here in the spring we're
going to paint our avocado trees we're going to give them a coat of sun
sunscreen to protect them from the hot Summer Sun the other thing you need to
do at this time of the year is if you see any flowers just pick them out you
don't want a tree this size making fruit I know it's heartbreaking but you do
need to leave it until it's well established to let it fruit so just note
that as well so the first thing you need to do is you need to locate the graft on
your trunk of your tree and the reason you need to do this is because anything
that shoots below the graft you need to remove that's desuckering so this is
the Scion this is the grafted part of your tree it's the variety which has the
good quality for it you want and in this case it's a Sheppard avocado this is a
seedling avocado so anything that shoots from below this point you need to remove
so when you paint your tree and I've done one here you can see it's quite
difficult to see the graft Union so it's really important before you start locate
the graft make a note where it is and if necessary you can just put a little bit
of different coloured paint on that part of the tree so you know exactly where it
is this is our Sun screen this is the paint that we're going to put on our
tree the trunk of our tree to protect it and it's just house emulsion so if
you've got some acrylic wall paint that is perfect but you're going to dilute it
about one part paint to three parts water and what you get is a very liquid
mix of paint that goes on very easily it's
going to be a bit messy so just be careful where you get it try not to get it all
over yourselves
and we're just going to paint the trunk of the tree
So even once you've painted the stem on your Avocado Tree.
you're still going to need to protect it from the very hot summer weather that we
get here in Australia and this is a great thing to do it with this is a
sock made out of shade cloth and it's just been sewed together in a double
width so it's basically a tube of double shade cloth and it's the height of the
tree once you plant it in the ground so you just put three star pickets in the
ground and put that over your avocado tree and it's going to protect it during
very hot weather on very hot days when it's going to be 35 40 or more make sure
you put an additional cover over the top of that just to protect that tree during
the very hot part of the day you can take that cover off in the morning and
late in the afternoon once the weather's cooled off but that's going to protect
your tree during summer and get it well established which is a really important
thing to do with our Avocado trees make sure they don't get sunburned because it
is a very damaging thing and you will risk losing your graft Rodney has generously
offered to hammer in the star pickets for me to show you how to do this
and it lets the air flow through but it protects your tree from the sunshine and
then once you've got your shade cloth over bang in your other star pickets to
make a nice tight triangle
so if you've got your avocado planted and you don't have the gear on hand to
make your little shade house you can do a quick cheap fix just to protect it while
you get everything organized so you just need to cut some nice bushy foliage off
an existing tree from your garden Callistemons are great melaleucas are
great this is Nandina it's just going to work as a temporary shade wall and
you're going to pop it in on the western side so if I can just push these in it's
a little bit hard in our demonstration spot here so the idea is that you just
want to create a shade wall that's going to protect your tree while you actually
get your shade house establish so you can then go off and build your little
shade shade cloth house and get your star pickets and you're ready to protect
it on a more permanent basis so this is just a temporary fix that works quite
well just to save it from a hot day in the meantime