Wow, what a good summer we’ve had. The hot weather has continued through September further extending the productive gardening and flowering period. This is an ideal time and opportunity to harvest fruits, take cut flowers, and deadhead faded ones. For this I’ve been trying out the Wilkinson Sword Straight Pruning Snip.
The Straight Pruning Snip has long nosed cutting blades made from stainless steel, with a lightweight cast aluminium body and soft hand grips for comfort; making it ideal for precise pruning & flower cutting. The tool is also able to cope with fresh stems up to 18mm in diameter.
The Straight Pruning Snips made easy work of the pruning tasks; such as deadheading the Dahlia’s and Geraniums to help prolong the flowering period. I was able to quickly and accurately pick out the old stems to be cut with the sharp long nosed blades.
When taking cut flowers from around the garden, I found that they suit the use more than say using traditional secateurs for the simple reason that you can reach through and in-between many close stems to cut out the ones you want. Larger bladed tools would make this difficult, Cosmos being a good example.
I also found that the Straight Pruning Snips were ideal for harvesting Chilli’s as the stems can be quite tough to cut using scissors as I had been using before. The long nosed blades made it easy to pick out the ripe ones without damaging others.
The long nosed snips were equally good for cutting out some of the old woody stems from herbs such as Mint, Thyme, Parsley and Sage, as well as harvesting fresh ones for use in the kitchen.
Overall I found the Wilkinson Sword Straight Pruning Snips very comfortable to use. They made precise pruning jobs far easier than I had expected, as well as perhaps being the ideal tool to harvest Chilli’s, at least that’s what my dad is saying!