How to Mistreat Your Pruners

A true gardener knows where his or her pruners are at all times. A gardener without pruners is like a knight without his sword, like Yogi Bear without Boo Boo, like a monkey without a banana. It’s also like a hitchhiker without a towel in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. And I quote...

“... a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

If you replace the hitchhiker with a gardener and replace the towel with a pair of pruners, you see what I mean. But what happens when a gardener forgets his or her pruners? I’ll show you what happens. Beware, it’s not for the faint of heart...

Rusty pruners*.

Ahhhh!!! This is what happens when you leave your trusty pair of pruners outside for an entire week. What makes it worse is that I didn’t even realize I had left them outside until I went to use them today and couldn’t find them in my handy trug that I use for all of my small tools.

My garden trug of tools (with Izzy and Molly)

If I was in possession of some sort of Gardener Certificate or Degree, it would have to be taken away. A real gardener never looses her pruners. However, it’s not the first time it’s happened and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I need to make a suit of Velcro so I can stick my tools to me as I work along in the garden, or I need little garden fairies or gnomes to follow me around picking up what I misplace along the way.

The good news is they are working perfectly fine. And I’m betting there’s a product out there that can take off the rust.

* These are Fiskars forged bypass pruners. I’ve been using them for about a year and so far I’m diggin’ them. For several years I used a Felco bypass pruner with the ergonomic rotating handle. I would get really annoyed with the rotating handle because it was constantly turning out of position, plus the pruners kept falling apart – there’s a piece that holds the blades together and that kept coming loose. This is why you haven’t seen pruners in my “Favorite Garden Tools” posts. If I could find a pair of pruners similar to what I have now, but with a softer, more rubber-like handle, similar to the Oxo trowel handle material, I think that would be a winner.