Pruning Plants: Learn How to Prune Plants Without Killing Them

Does pruning plants intimidate you? Afraid of killing your plants? It is not as scary as you think and you can learn how to prune properly.

A lot of tasks in gardening add to the garden.

What do I mean by that?

Whether you are planting something, adding mulch to your beds, building some structures or adding paths, you are improving your garden by adding to it.

If something doesn’t work out you can remove it and replace it. If you planted something in the wrong spot, you can in most cases move it successfully.

So doing anything in your garden that involves cutting things can be quite intimidating.

You are taking something away from your garden, specifically from a plant that has been growing well and producing vegetables, fruit, flowers or foliage.

Pruning when done wrong can affect a plant’s health.

In fact in some cases you can kill a plant by pruning incorrectly. Therefore pruning for beginner gardeners can be a very stressful task, filled with fear and apprehension that you will do something wrong.

Let’s put that stress to rest and look at how you can make pruning easier.

This is a comprehensive post on pruning.

Tools You Need For Pruning Plants

You will need a few simple tools to make pruning bushes and other plants easy and effective.

The right tools will allow you to prune plants without damaging them and inviting disease into the cuts. And as with other gardening tasks, having the right tools means you will also be able to prune quickly with not much wasted effort.

Here is a list of tools I recommend:

1. Pruners: A good set of pruners is critical to effective pruning that won’t damage your plants. They are also called secateurs or clippers. They need to be comfortable to hold and have a good spring action to open after you squeeze them shut, but not so stiff as to cause hand fatigue.

Felco Pruning Shears (F 5) – High Performance Swiss Made One-Hand Garden Pruners

2. Loppers: If you are mainly cutting plants that have soft stems or woody stems under 1/2 inch (~1cm) in diameter, you may not need loppers. However if you have a pair of loppers you’ll avoid the temptation to cut woody stems that are too thick for your pruners. You can break your pruners and you can injure your hands as well by trying to cut thick branches.

Power Lever Extendable Handles Bypass Lopper Telescopes, 27” to 37”

3. Hedge Shears: Using hedge shears is usually reserved for trimming hedges, which this post won’t cover specifically. However hedge shears can also be used on bushy plants to trim them to shape more quickly than using pruners to cut each branch or stem indiv