I have an older Valencia Orange that keeps getting sunburn damage on the branches. It was originally overgrown with Ivy and now that it is removed, there isn't enough leaf coverage to protect the branches. Damaged branches make less leaves and the cycle repeats. Summer is coming and the sun is about to get brutal again.

I'm making a semi-temporary shade structure for the Summer. Any idea how dense a shadecloth would be good for a hot inland SoCal Valley? Upland is former Citrus country.

In case anyone is wondering why I don't just spend 10 hours painting every branch, the branches are just covered in the ivy remains and it keeps falling off. If I spent a bunch of time scraping that off, I'm afraid I would kill the tree.

I'm thinking of cutting all the sunburn damaged branches off, which will leave me with a tree about 8' tall and wide. The trunk is about 1 foot diameter. There would still be 100+ leaves on the tree but they would be mostly first year growth sprouted out of the big branches at that point.

I'm considering making the structure a bit bigger so that I can plant two others now that it has gotten a bit late in the year to plant in the full sun.