This excerpt has been taken from “The pruning book” by “Lee Reich”. Specialized pruning tools are discussed in detail with their usage in the below article. “Tree Removal Berkeley CA” renders you essential information on these tools.
Now we enter the realm of specialized pruning tools some of which you may or may not ever require.
Shearing Knife
A shearing knife is useful for keeping a Christmas tree or a large hedge shapely and dense as it grows. This knife has a long handle and a blade that is thin, sharp, and also long. Because it is used samurai fashion, also consider purchasing leg guards along with a shearing knife.
Bush hook
Growers of red raspberries constantly have to remove wayward suckers, and a tool that facilitates this job is a bush hook, which consists of a sharpened hook at the end of a long handle. With this tool, you can walk along the row, hook the blade under a sucker, and jerk it out cleanly without even stooping. I stoop. (Anyway, I have only seen this tool pictured in old gardening books, so if you want one, you probably will have to make it yourself or have it made.)
Lawn mower
A lawn mower is, of course, also a specialized pruning tool, one with which everyone is familiar. Reel mowers can be human-, gasoline-, or electric- powered and cut more cleanly than rotary mowers, which must be powered by either gasoline or electricity.
Scythe
Do not overlook a scythe for “pruning’’ high grass- or, if you become skillful, even lawn grass. The so-called European-style scythe has a straight snath and a lightweight blade that is hammered, then honed to a razor-sharp edge—all in all a pleasure to use and not to be confused with the heavy, American-type scythe whose stamped blade cuts poorly.
Strawberry pruner
The highly specialized strawberry p0runer, described in liberty Hyde bailey’s the pruning book (1912), is for cutting all the runners off a strawberry plant all at once. The tool consists of a 10-in, diameter metal cylinder with one edge sharpened and the other attached to a handle that can be banged with a hammer or stomped upon with your foot, you place the cylinder around a plant, then apply the downward force to cut off the runners.
Specialized hand shears
This most useful pruning tool has undergone a number of modifications to extend its use, literally. Fiskar’s easy reach pruner puts the business end of the shear 15 in. or 25in, depending on the model, form your grip with even greater reach are pole hand shears—Fiskar’s pruning Stik and ARS’s Telescoping Long Reach Pruners, for example—that can extend up to 10fit. These lengthy tools are not at all unwieldy to use because they’re made of lightweight aluminum or plastic needless to say, you can’t drop these had shears into your back pocket before walking out to the garden.
And then there’s the hand shears that, with two minor but useful modifications, becomes a ‘’rose pruner.’’ The first modification is to move the cutting end of the tool a foot or so away from the handle, allowing you to reach within the thorny branches with the tool rather than your arm. The second modification is a springy piece of metal and a flat piece of plastic alongside the blade, the combination of which grabs and holds the thorny stem so you don’t have to reach within the bush with your other hand to hold the stem.
Moving in for really close pruning are fruit or bonsai pruners for clipping off individual or clusters of fruits of nipping off small stems or leaves.
High-limb chainsaw
Of all the pruning tools available, the one that has the least to recommend it is the high-limb chainsaw. The chain part of this tool is the high-limb chainsaw. The chain part of this tool is attached at either end to a rope. You throw the device over a high limb, grasp onto each end of the rope, centering the toothed chain over the limb, then alternately pull down on the ropes. The results can be disastrous: the worst-case scenario has the limb toppling on top of you, tearing a long strip of bark off the trunk on the way down.
A saner way to deal with high limbs and branches is with the previously mentioned pole say, although it admittedly does not reach as high as the high-limb chainsaw. You can even purchase a “pole pruner,’’ which has , in addition to a saw at its head, a shearing, just like that on hand shears, seated atop the pole and activated by a handle or rope at the bottom. Once you have managed to work this tool up through the tree to the branches that you want to cut, you have a choice of cutting devices still, the two-headed pole pruner is not quite as versatile as the ancient six-in-one tool that Columella wrote about for pruning grapes.
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