Hi, it's Jason again from Fraser Valley Rose farm. When giving advice on how to do propagation successfully one of the first things I always
mention is the importance of keeping a sharp and clean set of pruners
What I'm going to do in this video is to show you what that means
how to sharpen them up
what to lubricate them with, what to clean them with so they're free of disease and virus passing between your plants and
If you stick around towards the end of the video
I might do one additional step and make comparison then between an expensive set of prunners like this and
The cheap set that you'd find in your local hardware store or mass merchant store. So stick around
I'm just going to adjust the camera to look down so you can see a little better and I'll take you through it all
Okay
Your basic pruners are gonna look like this. Bypass printers. if you're making cuttings, you want the cleanest cut possible
I won't go into all the different types of pruners there are but this is a bypass style and
If you've got the other style the anvil style
What it does is tend to crush the plant between these two blades here
So for the cleanest cut you want to go for a bypass style
in
Using these one of the main risks that you that you incur is that you could spread diseases between your different plants
So if you've got bacterial, fungal, viral infections in your plants, you take cuttings of one
and then you go to that next plant and take cuttings of those
You could pass those viruses or diseases between the different plants
So one thing you'll have to do more often than any other piece of maintenance is you'll have to disinfect
and
You spray them down real good
This is a quaternary disinfectant it takes about 30 seconds to kill
99 point something percent plus of all of the viral
Bacterial, or fungal diseases that could be on your plants. I just buy this one at the local horticultural store
It's called Virkon but a disinfectant of any sort will do all
so a lot of people use a 10% bleach solution, which I think again you would spray it and
You'd use it in the field. The one thing that is true
both of the quaternary disinfectant and especially of
the bleach is
that having used it on your tools if you just then put it away and
Left it for a week. You come back. You might not even be able to open. It's gonna be like rusted shut
That's because the water in the disinfectant or in the bleach solution is a bit of a corrosive
So it's gonna tend to oxidize your blades and you'll end up with problems with your blades so after you're done
with your day of
Pruning or even sometimes in between depending on how it's working for you
You're going to want to lubricate your blades. Also you sharpen as necessary
so the most common thing you'll have to do is disinfect, but you'll also have to
lubricate and sharpen as
necessary, so
in terms of lubricants
This is another area where I'm not going to say that which particular products you use matters
A lot of people just reuse regular motor oil or household oil 3-in-1 is fine
what I use just for convenience of
Application and for another reason I'll answer in a second is I use WD-40
Now WD-40 is a penetrating lubricant and it also is a water displacement agent
now I mentioned I mentioned a minute ago that it's the water in the disinfectant or
water combined with bleach. Also, there's lots of liquid or water in
plant residues that are getting onto your tools as you use them
so if the water gets into the area, they're the pivot of
your
Pruners or if it gets into the spring if that water stays there. That's what's going to tend to corrode. So by using wd-40
Getting it into those spots there and onto the spring as well, but again all over the blades
You can be generous with this
This is after a disinfecting step, by the way
then
You wipe that off. It's going to displace that water that's gotten into your tool and
Lubricate and act as a penetrating lubricant at the same time
Other things you can use about white lithium grease here. That's another one that I've used on occasion
I've used just regular silicon spray and that's fine, too
I mean basically anything you have on hand isn't gonna harm the tool but I found just for convenience of use that
Wd-40 is the best
so the next thing I'm going to show you about these tools is a little bit of how they work and
Excuse me, while I mug up real close to the camera here and see if I can get myself into focus
So this blade here is not really a blade. it's completely
Blunt on the backside here. It just holds the plant in place while this blade closes upon it so
This here is the cutting blade
So that's the one you have to sharpen
Any amount of sharpening on this blade would be wasted so I'm going to show you
How to do the sharpening here remember I mentioned it was this one here
I guess if you call this one
Concave and this one convex
you'd be
sharpening
The outer side of the convex blade as you can see
let's even get an angle that works here as they close
one slides over against the other and it's really
The space between them that causes problems
So if you were to sharpen now
This side of the blade you would tend to increase the space between these two blades
whereas if you this side of the blade
That just sharpens the edge
now angle
It's gonna be a hard one to explain
but basically I'm just gonna say it's not
a
45-degree angle, but more like half of a 45-degree angle or a 22 degree angle. So you're actually putting quite a narrow angle on this
To make it quite sharp
Now with sharpener use this one here I couldn't even tell you where I got it from
I think it probably came from my dad at one point or another
It's helpful because it's not a big block of sharpening stone
So you want something that's narrow like this that you can actually get it
Into this area between the two blades like if you had a big sharpening block here
You're trying to force it in between this blade and this
You'd have a bit of a problem doing that's just less helpful
What I will do maybe is I'll put below the video a link to Amazon and just show you one
That would be appropriate. Although there may be many that are appropriate for that purpose
so
Again, just a good
Working over of the blade for end to end and now you have a sharp
Lubricated blade ready for use the next time now
To know that it's sharp
I'm going to bring in a piece of this is buddleja here and if I take a cut now
you're gonna be able to see how
clean that
cut is
But that's exactly what you want when you're propagating a good
clean cut
With no, no bits of skin on the outside or any crushing. This actually is kind of a hollow stem
So if we can cut it out cleanly you have a really good chance of making that cut also just to demonstrate
how about some
potting tags here and
If you sharpened it right should just make a nice
Easy cut of that
Nice and flat nice and straight shouldn't bend over ever anything else
So the next thing I want to show you here
I've got a couple of cheap blades here and
thay say China on them one place or another so they're a lot cheaper than these Felco
printers the red the red handle ones that I showed you first and
On this one, at least I could feel it. I mean, it's it's lighter
the actual width of the handles is
narrower and
I can see on it
That there's on the anvil portion here. There's actually a big split between
One layer of metal and another so it's definitely not as high-quality
There's a bit of crunchiness in the spring there what I'm gonna try to do because I haven't used these ones in a while
Is I'm just gonna see if putting a little bit of wd-40 on there
improves the feel of the blade
substantially and
You know it does
so
You know, what I will do with these ones here. I want to make the comparison
between that Felco and
This cheap Chinese blade here, but to make a fair comparison. I got to sharpen this one up
So stay with me for just a second
It's taking some work to sharpen these up
There's definitely some corrosion on there
Haven't used these in ages
What this stone does is it pulls off just a small amount of metal as it's sharpening
This may have to be the part where I do a tiny bit of time-lapse just to get to the destination faster
Okay, having done all that
Maybe I will take a test cut here and
I still have the stem here. So we'll take a cut and
Even after the sharpening
I'm having a harder time making the cut and it seems to crush the stem an awful lot more
When I look down the blade here
I think the reason for that isn't because I skimped on the sharpening but is actually because there's a little bit of space between
the cutting blade and the holding blade and that's making the plant sort of
Twist as I make the cut
Still passable in a certain way if you were just doing landscape pruning that might do the job
But for propagation I would really advise you to use
something a little nicer
this one here just came out of the package and
This is like a
seven dollar
Blade that I got from a hardware store. I noticed as I looked at it in the store. It actually has the same
width of handle and
It's obviously a lot newer
So I thought I'd give a shot and see how this one works
It's already sharp, but
Just touching it up here
Let's see how that one does
Yeah, actually pretty clean right on the box
When I look at this, I could see already again that little bit of space developing between the two metal
layers of the flat edge
The movement is quite good. It feels quite firm in the hand
The width is a lot more like the Felco so it feels more comfortable
I don't know how these will hold up but a nice clean cut right now
In fact, maybe what I'll try is one other quick thing here
This here's just a big plant here
and
You know makes a nice clean cut in the leaf is well
I'll try the Felco here
And maybe a touch cleaner, but I guess my thought on
the cheap blades is
you know
Maybe I'll I'll put it this way. You don't actually end up spending a lot of money on pruners
Over the course of your time in the garden
You might buy one of these and
it cost you, you know, 75 or a hundred dollars for a nice pair of pruners and
It's gonna last you many many years you may have to replace the spring in it
You may have to replace this blade once or twice, but overall you don't ever spend a ton of money
however, if you are a bit short of cash and you wanted to get one of these
From well, I guess this would just be from a mass merchants store
won't say the name right now, and if you
Sharpen it faithfully and you lubricate it and disinfect it. You may get some decent use out of it
I think this one here is so cheaply made. It may be beyond help. So with the Chinese blades
Consistency may be lacking and if you have the money for it
I would recommend you go ahead and get something higher quality like the Felco
Alright, that's all I had to say on this video. If you have any questions, please leave them below