Here’s a list of useful gardening tools, especially for home and container gardening that will certainly make your life easier!
SELF WATERING NEEDLES: These inexpensive drip needles are quite simple but a powerful system for slow and self watering of potted plants. Just thread in any standard water bottle into this device – It easily fits most international standards bottles such as coca cola bottles, sprite bottles, pepsi bottles and so on. Cut the top of the bottle and insert this into the container close to the plant and fill it with water. Adjust the 360 degree drip flow knob to get desired flow of water or drops per minute depending on the watering requirement of you plant and there you have it. This is very useful especially if you are on a vacation for few days.
- ELECTRIC PRESSURE SPRAYER: Depending upon the size of your home garden, you can choose a hand held 2.5 litre rechargeable electric sprayer or a 10 litre knapsack electric sprayer that works on 12V DC and a rechargeable battery. Or if your garden is even larger, you can connect a 12V DC pump to a garden hose and use a multi-mode sprayer gun like this and use the misting mode to spray your pesticides and foliar feeds. Using manual sprayers is cumbersome and lacks that ideal pressure needed for spraying pesticides and also they are not durable.
- GARDENING GLOVES: Protection First! You can either purchase multiple pairs of inexpensive gloves like these or a pair of good quality gardening gloves with claws in right hand. These not only protect your hands from dirt, thorns and even harmful insects, but also replace trowels and hand rakes for digging, raking and planting.
- GRAFTING TOOL: Grafting is actually made so easy with this tool. A Neat and Sharp cut is essential for a successful grafting. This tool comes with U-cut and V-cut blades and a pruner or cutter at the tip. You can save a lot of time and increase the success rates of your grafting. Just punch the tool on the root stock first and then on the scion branch and this fits in so perfectly and healing happens much faster than compared with manual methods like using a grafting knife and stuff like that.
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- WATERING CANS: Depending on the size of your garden, you can choose either small watering cans like these ranging from 2 litres to 5 litres – plastic or metallic cans. Fancy Metallic cans like this will have an advantage of no leaks from the nozzle sides while watering unlike the plastic cans which leak from joints while watering. This is a must have tool even if you have a garden hose, specially for watering seeds and seedlings with the fine showering action.
- WATERING HOSE: Invest on a good quality flexible rubber watering hose pipe to avoid those irritating kinks from a poor quality hose and have a peace of mind while watering your plants. This great quality hose comes in half an inch or Three-fourth inch calibre to opt, depending on the pressure of your home water supply or the floor you live in. It also comes with an optional retractable reel if you want more peace of mind.
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- FALCON EASY PLANTER: This is a very handy tool for digging holes at 5cm and 10cm and very useful for transplanting and planting bulbs, root balls and plants. Simply place this planter tool on the soil, twist and push down to create your hole and then lift out. Drop your bulb or the plant into the hole and by the press of a button, the soil is then released automatically. It’s that easy! You can also use this to transplant small plants and seedlings quickly and efficiently.
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- Heavy Duty Garden Spade or Shovel: This is the classical Indian spade. This is very important if you are preparing your own DIY potting mix to thoroughly mix all ingredients in proper proportions.
- 3-in-1 SOIL PH METER: This is a great inexpensive must have gadget to check three things in your garden. Most importantly to test your Soil PH which is one of the most important factor for nutrient absorption by the roots. This also tests your soil moisture level to avoid over watering or under watering your plants. Plus it has a light meter to check the light levels for your plants.
PURCHASE LINKS - A SMALL CROWBAR OR WRECKING BAR: This is particularly useful for ground gardening like for digging pits, removing obstacles and similar stuff.
- TWIST TIE: This is another must have stuff specially for tying your plants to supports. Twist on, twist off and Reuse the same year after year!
- SOIL SCOOPS: This is so handy – like if you do not wish to get your hands into the dirt. What you see here is just a steel rice scoop and serves the purpose of a soil scoop while repotting plants.
- Garden Trowel: This tool is a miniature version of a garden spade. It is used for mixing soil, digging a hole, transplanting seedlings, levelling out soil and even dividing tubers. It can also be used for scooping out compost or potting mix from the bag specially while repotting your plants.
- Garden Rake, Fork, Cultivator and Weed Removal Tool: At home gardening level, all these are smaller tools that serve the purpose of raking or making your top soil loose for preparing or aerating the soil before planting seeds or seedlings and also before or after applying fertilizers. The deweeder tool is handy in removing small weeds from root level.
- PRUNERS AND CUTTERS: There are various types of pruners and cutting tools in gardening ranging from floral snips to hand pruner, pole pruner, garden saw, hedge shears to a simple tool like a scissor. Depending on the type and the load of gardening, you can choose a particular type of cutting. Please watch a detailed video explaining various types of Pruners.
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Pruning means cutting or trimming the plant organs like branches, stems or even leaves for the sake of your plants health and sometimes to maintain plant shape and form. It is a very important task in gardening specially if you want your plants to perform well like to promote growth and flowering or fruiting. Another advantage of pruning is it allows you to remove the damaged or infected branches and leaves which can further spread and cause more damage.
In this Article, we will precisely look into many questions about plant pruning like:
a) When to prune which plants.
b) Types of Pruning
c) How to Prune and Why?
d) Pruning Tools
e) And many other concepts and tips on pruning.
PLANT SURGERY COMPARISON:
Before we proceed with these topics, first of all its important to know that pruning or cutting is actually wounding your plant. So doing it properly is really important. Pruning is actually a Plant Surgery similar to human or animal surgery, done either to save a plant from disease and also to make it look neat and good. Like the surgical wound, pruning also induces a wound or injury at the point of incision and this wound has to heal properly.
So Lets begin:
1. When to prune which plants? Let me start with a comparison. The best time to perform a surgery on a person is when they are in sleep, that’s during anaesthesia. This is the same for plants as well. As a general rule for most plants including flowering and fruiting plants they need to be pruned, specially hard pruning to be done while they are in a period of dormancy (that’s when they are asleep or inactive). This usually falls in late winter through early spring like in the month of January depending on your climatic zone. Another reason to perform this surgery in winter is the healing of wound is better in this cold season due to scientific reasons.
But some other plants need to be continuously pruned or trimmed I mean deadheaded or soft pruned, to maintain growth and flowering. We shall discuss this shortly.
Also remember to disinfect the cutting tools before your start snipping your plants. You can wipe the blades with any household disinfectant or you can also use hydrogen peroxide 3 or 6 percent and this is easily available at your local medical store.
2. Types of Pruning for house plants? Here we will learn Hard Pruning, Soft Pruning, Rejuvenation Pruning, Dead Heading and many other useful tips.
First we will start with:
Hard Pruning and Soft Pruning:Hard pruning or Annual Pruning as I discussed earlier is done in the dormant or inactive growth period of a plant during the late winter or early spring. In hard pruning, we cut off most of the plant stems and branches, atleast 50 percent to promote all new productive plant growth in the growing season.
Where as Soft Pruning can be performed any time of the year. Here we just trim the plant to onethird to half, the best example is pruning roses. This also includes dead heading. Deadheading means removal of dead or dried flowers from a plant which has just flowered. Sometimes it has to be a constant process and this diverts the plant energy into new growth and more flowering rather than drying up and consuming this energy into the seed formation process.
3. How to Prune? And Types of Pruning Cuts?
We will learn two important cuts here: Heading and Thinning Cuts:
Heading is the process of cutting or trimming branch tips, The cut is made anywhere on the branch or stem just half an inch above a node where it produces multiple branching usually two branches and this process makes your plant more bushy in the long run.One very important tip here:The cut is to be made at an angle of 45 degrees to allow water to run off. Because if a flat cut is made, water can stay on top of the wound which increases the chances of fungal or bacterial infection. Its also a good idea to Seal the wound with some stuff like wax or an antifungal powder or anything – even some recommend fevicol paste. If you can buy a tree paint or any commercially available pruning sealer, that’s still better. Some experts say its better to leave it open and let the plant heal itself specially for larger trees.
Thinning is the process of removing entire branches from a main stem by making a cut at its collar or just outside of the collar. Collar is the area where the branch connects with its main stem. Thinning helps sunlight to penetrate to interior foliage and promotes good air circulation and thus avoids fungus and bacterial growth.
If you are not sure how to and when to prune a particular plant, I still suggest you to atleast perform soft pruning atleast once in its growth cycle.
Regarding Choosing the right Pruning Tools, You can check that HERE.