Should I disinfect my secateurs between plants?

The honest position is that secateur hygiene is over-recommended in general and under-practised in exactly the situations where it counts. Cleaning between every cut on a healthy hedge achieves nothing. Not cleaning between a virused plant and a healthy one of the same family transmits the virus reliably.

Safety

Step by step

1. Decide whether this job is one of the ones that matters.It matters when you are cutting out diseased material, when you are moving between plants of the same family that could share a disease, when you are propagating, and when you are pruning anything known to be susceptible to a wound-entry disease.
2. Remove the sap and soil first.Disinfectant does very little through a film of dried sap or a crust of soil. Wipe the blade with a cloth, or scrub it with a stiff brush and water, before applying anything.
3. Use something that actually disinfects, and give it time.Household disinfectant at the label dilution, or surgical spirit, or a dilute bleach solution. Wipe or dip the blade and leave it wet for at least half a minute — instant wiping does not do the job.
4. Rinse and oil after bleach.Bleach pits and corrodes carbon steel quickly and will ruin a good pair of secateurs. Rinse in clean water, dry, and wipe with a lightly oiled cloth.
5. Cut the healthy plants first, the suspect ones last.Sequencing removes most of the risk without any cleaning at all. Do the whole garden and finish at the plant you are worried about, then clean once at the end.
6. Take extra care with virus-prone plants.Roses, dahlias, tomatoes, raspberries, hostas and lilies all carry viruses that move in sap. If you are cutting anything showing mottled or distorted growth, treat the blade as contaminated.
7. Clean boots and forks too where soil-borne disease is involved.Clubroot, white rot and honey fungus travel on soil, not on sap. Knock and brush soil off boots, forks and spades before moving from an affected bed to a clean one, and do not move soil or compost between them.
8. Keep the blade sharp, which matters more than hygiene.A clean, sharp cut seals fast. A crushed, torn cut from blunt blades leaves damaged tissue that stays open longer, and an open wound is what disease actually needs.

Tips

• Keep a jar of disinfectant and a cloth in the bucket you carry, so cleaning is a two-second job rather than a trip indoors.
• Alcohol wipes work well and are convenient, but they evaporate in seconds — you often need two.
• Prune susceptible trees in the right weather rather than obsessing over the blade: dry conditions matter more than a sterile tool for canker, silver leaf and fireblight.
• Sharpening and oiling secateurs at the end of a session does more for plant health over a year than disinfecting them does.

Common mistakes

• Dipping in bleach and putting the tool away wet — It corrodes the steel and seizes the pivot. Rinse, dry and oil, or use surgical spirit instead.
• Wiping a blade covered in sap with disinfectant — The sap is where the pathogen is, and the disinfectant never reaches it. Clean mechanically first.
• Disinfecting religiously but pruning plums and cherries in winter — The timing of the cut matters far more than the tool. Wet winter pruning is how silver leaf and bacterial canker get into stone fruit.

Questions people ask