You should disinfect your pruning shears, especially after cutting diseased trees or shrubs, to prevent you from spreading the viruses, fungi or bacteria to other plants. Find out below which agents are suitable for disinfecting secateurs and what quick alternatives there are.

After cutting diseased plants, the secateurs should definitely be disinfected

How can you disinfect the secateurs?

Various cleaning agents can be used for disinfection, most of which need to work for some time. A quick method is to burn it off with a torch. Here, however, you must be extremely careful not to burn the plastic part.
Other means are:

  • boiling water
  • spirit
  • alcohol
  • special disinfectant spray for garden tools
  • tea tree oil

Step by step disinfect the garden shears

In the following we explain briefly how to disinfect your pruning shears with spirit or alcohol step by step.

  • Unscrew the secateurs
  • Roughly clean both parts with a metal brush
  • Put the metal parts of the secateurs completely in a container with alcohol or spirit and wait at least 10 minutes.
  • Alternatively, place the pruning shears in a pot of boiling water and let them cook on a low flame for 10 minutes.

When is it necessary to disinfect secateurs?

Trees and shrubs can become diseased. Then a pruning is often necessary to remove infested parts of the plant. After such a pruning measure, you should disinfect your pruning shears, but not only then! Diseases are not always recognizable. It would be best to disinfect the secateurs after each shrub, but that takes a lot of effort. What alternatives are there?

Fast disinfection while working

Many gardeners who find it too much work to thoroughly disinfect their pruning shears after each plant cut have developed intelligent methods that may not kill all germs, but certainly increase hygiene and thus reduce the risk of infection. Three means have established themselves here:

  • high percentage of alcohol
  • spirit
  • Household disinfectant spray or wipes

After each plant cut, put a dash of one of the above agents on a tissue and wipe the cut surfaces with it. The quick, if not quite 100% disinfection is done.

tips

Washing off with warm water after each cut does not kill germs, viruses or fungi.

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Care tips