Many people are middle-aged when they first take up gardening. Sometimes it’s been a lifelong hobby.

At some point, sadly, your body starts to age even as your garden expands, and tasks that used to be easy become a strain.

One of these chores is pruning, something many plants really can’t do without. Like getting enough regular water.

Pruning Thicker Twigs

When dealing with rosebushes, you can prune them easily, at nearly any age. Fruit trees are a different matter, though.

It’s difficult to imagine a better gift for friends and family than peaches grown in your own garden, especially if they’ve been canned or turned into a preserve. But come spring your normal aches and pains might tempt you to just let trimming your trees slide.

Traditional secateurs do well enough at lopping off sprouts. The problem with these shears arises when you try to cut thicker branches that have become diseased or are growing in the wrong direction. A cut that isn’t clean or straight, like what you get when you have to gnaw on the wood with your shears, hurts the tree more than is needed and looks far from good.

The alternative is to use a saw, but doing this on a ladder is far from pleasant if you don’t have much confidence in your balance.

Ryobi’s Pruning Shears

The answer you may not realize you’ve been looking for is these cordless electric pruning shears.

Weighing only 3½ ounces, they’re capable of snipping branches of up to ½” in diameter.

Charging up the battery takes less than an hour, after which you can use it for 20 to 40 minutes, depending on how hard you make it work.

The only negative thing we have to say about this product is that it’s difficult to find replacement blades from Ryobi itself (although your local hardware store probably has some that will fit) and that the instruction booklet is in Japanese.

The latter isn’t really a problem, though: all you need to know is that there are two triggers: one on the handle and another within the trigger guard.

As a safety feature, both have to be depressed for the jaws to close. Happy trimming!