Pruning shears are an essential tool for maintaining your garden. Knowing how to clean your pruning shears is a very important part of preventing the spread of pests and diseases from plant to plant. The key is to regularly disinfect your garden pruning shears and other tools, even if the plants you’re pruning look healthy. This guide covers everything you need to know about when and how to disinfect your pruning shears (and other gardening tools) and use four simple ways to do it using what you may already have in your home.
Why Should You Clean Your Pruning Shears?
Frequent cleaning of pruning shears and other gardening tools can help these items last longer and prevent rust and debris buildup. What’s more, cleaning and disinfecting gardening tools can help prevent the spread of many common plant pests and diseases, including:
- Spider mites
- Powdery mildew
- Downy mildew
- Blight
- Damping off
When to Sterilize the Pruning Shears
Any tools that come into direct contact with garden plants should be disinfected regularly. These include pruning tools like garden shears, trimmers, scissors, scissors, shears, and pruners.
How often your tools need to be cleaned depends on how you use them and whether there are obvious plant pests and diseases in your garden. It is a good gardening practice to disinfect all garden tools at least once a year in the spring or fall. However, if your plant is suffering from an active infection or infestation, you should disinfect your tools more often.
For example, if your plants are showing signs of powdery mildew and you decide to prune off infected leaves, you will need to disinfect the pruning tools between each plant in your garden.
Products That Should Be Avoided When Cleaning Garden Tools
While it may be tempting to use standard household cleaners such as Lysol or Listerine on gardening tools, there is no scientific evidence that these products are effective against plant pathogens, and these cleaning products can corrode gardening tools. It is not recommended to use distilled vinegar to disinfect gardening tools, as it is not strong enough to disinfect gardening tools thoroughly. Baking soda is also not a good solution. It is a salt that can change the pH of the soil but does not kill the fungus.
4 Effective Ways to Clean Your Pruning Shears
When you’re ready to sterilize your pruning shears, start by cleaning them thoroughly, especially if they’ve been sitting out for a while. Using water, detergent, and a good quality brush, scrape off dirt or rust from garden shears and other pruning tools. This makes it easier to clean up the tool later.
While there are certainly some household cleaning products that should not be used in gardening supplies, all four disinfection methods have been shown to be effective in inhibiting blight, fungi, and other plant pathogens.
1. Rubbing Alcohol
Rubbing alcohol is available at most grocery stores and pharmacies, and it’s the most effective and economical way to clean and disinfect gardening tools. Just make sure that the product you use contains at least 70% isopropyl alcohol or rubbing alcohol.
The beauty of using rubbing alcohol on your gardening tools is that the product works faster than other methods. If you need to sanitize your garden trimmer or other pruning tools between plants, rubbing alcohol is one of the easiest and safest products you can get.
Rubbing alcohol can be applied with a spray bottle, or gardening tools can be wiped down with a damp cloth. After application, wait 30 seconds, or allow to dry completely, and the tool is ready to be sterilized and ready to use.
2. Bleach
Bleach is another super effective method of disinfecting pruning shears, but it doesn’t work as quickly as alcohol. To disinfect gardening tools with bleach, mix 1 part bleach with 9 parts water to make a 10% bleach solution. Then, soak the tool in the mixture for 30 minutes, remove it from the bleach mixture, and allow it to air dry.
Since bleach takes longer to work, it’s not as useful as alcohol for disinfecting gardening tools on the move. However, bleach is often the best and most economical option if you want to clean items in bulk or need to sanitize large items such as seed starting trays or trowels.
Warning: Whenever bleach is used, wear gloves to avoid skin injury, and never mix bleach with other cleaning products.
3. Hydrogen Peroxide
Like bleach, hydrogen peroxide takes some time to work, but it can be another useful cleaning product in your gardening tools. If you want to use hydrogen peroxide, look for a 3% solution, which is commonly sold in pharmacies and grocery stores.
Hydrogen peroxide is often sprayed on reusable seed starting trays to help prevent cataplexy. However, the product can also be sprayed or wiped on tomato cages, terracotta pots, and gardening hand tools. Gardening supplies can also be soaked in hydrogen peroxide, but bleach is often a more economical way to soak gardening tools.
Hydrogen peroxide takes about 5 to 10 minutes to disinfect items, so it is not as effective as a pruning shears for cleaning between plants. However, if you need to clean your pruning shears at the end of the day or at the end of the growing season, hydrogen peroxide works very well.
4. Heat
Most people know that heat can be sterilized, so it’s no surprise that heat can be an effective way to disinfect pruning shears and other gardening tools. However, heating may not be the most practical method for large gardening tools and should not be used for tools containing plastic, as these items will melt at high temperatures.
Boiling, steaming, or baking gardening tools at a temperature of 180°F to 200°F for about 30 minutes will kill most plant pathogens, but these tools must be small enough to fit in a stovetop or oven. This method is best suited for small objects, such as metal plant tags, metal pruning shears, or small clay pots. Don’t forget to use hand protection when picking up these heat-treated items; They’re going to be hot.
Frequently Asked Questions:
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What are the disadvantages of hydrogen peroxide disinfection garden tools?
Hydrogen peroxide is a great method, but it can be more expensive than bleach and not as effective as rubbing alcohol. That said, hydrogen peroxide is a great way to clean a variety of gardening tools and is especially useful for preventing blight.
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Can vinegar be used to clean pruning shears?
Vinegar can be used to remove rust from pruning shears and other metal gardening tools, but it is not an effective way to disinfect gardening items.
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How do you get rid of fungus on gardening tools?
Many common plant pathogens, including powdery mildew and blight, are caused by fungi or similar microorganisms. Their spores are easily killed by heat, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, or a 10% bleach solution.
