Cheap and cheerful: how to choose the right pruner for a summer residence

Trim­ming stems, flow­ers, form­ing a vine and a crown — all this can­not be done with­out a pruner. But a poor-qual­i­ty or inap­pro­pri­ate tool can injure a shrub or tree. At best, a rich har­vest is not to be seen. At worst, the plant will sim­ply die. How to choose a good pruner? This ques­tion was answered by “The most use­ful pro­gram”.

What is a pruner and why is it needed

The seca­teurs are the main tool of gar­den­ers. If you have a pruner, and also if it is con­ve­nient, if it is your favorite, you will nev­er cause any severe dam­age to the tree, ” — said the gar­den­er Andrey Tumanov.

The pruner is a sim­ple tool, but it can have dif­fer­ent types of mech­a­nism. The most inex­pen­sive — spring and lever. Also recent­ly on the shelves appeared tools with a ratch­et mech­a­nism. Man­u­fac­tur­ers promise: with such seca­teurs, even thick branch­es can be cut with­out much effort. How­ev­er, the authors of the pro­gram found that this tool is not so effec­tive.

Secateurs with “rotary handle”

“It doesn’t look like some kind of pro­tec­tion against, let’s say, wrong actions. It’s most like­ly just a design flaw.” — said the expert.

Accord­ing to him, it makes no sense to take seca­teurs with the so-called rotary han­dle. After all, it is expen­sive, and it can only come in handy for tend­ing a farm or a large gar­den. For work on a reg­u­lar site, a clas­sic pruner is suit­able.

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Crash test secateurs. Which is better: cheap or expensive

The authors of the pro­gram chose four sam­ples at once with dif­fer­ent blade designs: two bypass and two con­tact ones. Cheap­er and more expen­sive.

“When­ev­er you choose a tool, you still need to take it out of the pack­age and try how it fits in your hand. The hand itself will tell you whether this tool is here or not, ” Tumanov advised.

The bypass seca­teurs work like scis­sors: both blades move and cut into the wood at once. Due to this, the cut is neat.

But the con­tact resem­bles a knife, it has only one blade. The sec­ond plate serves as a plat­form.

“Look, I don’t find much dif­fer­ence between cheap and expen­sive pruners. In prin­ci­ple, here on small branch­es one to one. Here, the cuts are also approx­i­mate­ly the same, ” the gar­den­er explained.

In order to test the tools for giv­ing, it was decid­ed to com­pli­cate the task: they took sev­er­al branch­es of dif­fer­ent thick­ness­es from 16 to 22 mil­lime­ters and made five cuts on each.

A cheap bypass pruner cut through all the branch­es in 53 sec­onds. It turned out to be more dif­fi­cult to work with con­tact tools, both expen­sive and cheap. There­fore, the time to com­plete the task took more than half a minute.

Expen­sive bypass seca­teurs failed this test at all. Despite his best efforts, he could not even cut a branch with a diam­e­ter of 20 mil­lime­ters. It turns out that the fastest way to work in the coun­try is with a cheap bypass pruner.

After that, it was decid­ed to find out the max­i­mum diam­e­ter of the branch­es that the tools could bite.

In a test with a branch 24 mm thick, the con­tact pruner for 700 rubles showed itself worst of all. Dear assis­tant coped with the task. But 24 mil­lime­ters turned out to be his max­i­mum. But a bypass tool for 700 rubles was able to cut a branch 26 mil­lime­ters thick.

“We found out that the price does not always deter­mine the qual­i­ty. Beau­ty does not always deter­mine qual­i­ty. Not always such a pow­er­ful appear­ance and sever­i­ty also deter­mine per­for­mance. So, prob­a­bly, you should not chase after some nov­el­ties and promis­es. Take it, buy an ordi­nary work­ing inex­pen­sive seca­teurs, and every­thing will be well cut off for you, ” Tumanov advised.

The authors of the pro­gram decid­ed to give the tools anoth­er test with nails. Expen­sive pin pruner failed the test. He did not mas­ter a sin­gle nail, and notch­es imme­di­ate­ly appeared on the blade.

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The test leader is a cheap bypass tool. I bit through four nails. But the record was set by an inex­pen­sive con­tact pruner. He was able to cut six nails before dam­age appeared on the blade.

“We can con­clude that there is enough strong, good steel here. It has­n’t real­ly fad­ed with us yet.” con­clud­ed the gar­den­er.

The crash test showed that it makes no sense to over­pay when buy­ing a seca­teurs. The cheap­est bypass tool turned out to be bet­ter than the expen­sive ones.

How to take care of a pruner

In order for the pruner to serve for a long time, it must be prop­er­ly looked after, cleaned after each use, and after the sum­mer sea­son, lubri­cat­ed with oil and stored only in a dry room with good ven­ti­la­tion.

Anoth­er option: do not remove the tool for the win­ter at all. Few peo­ple know, but it can become indis­pens­able not only in the gar­den, but also in the kitchen. They can eas­i­ly and quick­ly cut fish and poul­try.