Must-Have Cutting Tools – House Plant Journal

Must-Have Cutting Tools

The selection of pruners/scissors/snips involved in gardening can be overwhelming. Luckily, for houseplant parents, we are mostly dealing with soft-stem plant material.

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Long Handled Snips (Amazon Link)

I love these bonsai-inspired long handled snips for making precise cuts of dead foliage. The long handles make it easy to reach within dense foliage (like a peace lily) to cut off a spent leaf.

Leaves have a limited lifespan. Keep calm, cut them off, and move on. Long handled snips help you make precise cuts deep in the foliage.
All cleaned up!

By-Pass Pruners (Amazon Link)

When you’re cutting a stem for propagation, you want to make as clean a cut as you can. By-pass pruners are sharp and capable of cutting through thick stems, like a Monstera deliciosa – which can get to larger than one inch in diameter after years of good growth.

The adjustable jaw size is helpful for keeping the handles at a predictable grasping width.

They’re called “by-pass” because the blade travels cleanly past the dull supporting blade. The mechanism mimics a sharp knife cutting along a cutting board. Contrast this with scissors where the mechanism is two blades shearing along their edges.

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