If you came over to my house today, and went into my back yard and took a walk around, chances are you’d find three or four pair of garden gloves. I always have excellent intentions of taking good care of my gloves, and somehow they always end up strewn about the yard.
A pair will be tossed into a large, plastic garden centre pot, in a corner of the garden where I’ve been weeding. Another pair will be sitting on top of the rainbarrel, where I think I’ll remember to pick them up on my way into the house. Another pair will be stuck at the top of a bamboo tripod, whimsically waving to the birds (or flipping the bird, depending on my mood when I placed them there).
In the spring I haul my gloves out of the shed and hang them up to air out on the clothes line, and they usually end up hanging there for a week or so before I tuck them away again.
I don’t really like to wear gloves in the garden. I much prefer the feel of the earth on my fingers, the fine touch of my fingertips on the stems of those weeds as, with great satisfaction, I yank them from the ground among the herbs and vegetables. A fine touch is needed to handle seeds or for planting annuals.
Some jobs just seem to require gloves, though, so I do have a leather pair for pulling those prickly thistle weeds or pruning raspberry canes. I sometimes wear a cloth pair of gloves when searching for stinging nettles or handling something especially slimy.
While I’m working in the yard, the fingers of a pair of gloves can often be seen sticking out of the back pocket of my jeans, at the ready should the unfortunate need to wear them arise. In the meantime, I’m barehanded, my fingers always ready to plunge into the dirt.
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My favorite pair are cloth and have rubber just on the palms and fingers– as though I put on a pair of cloth gloves and barely touched a vat of colored latex palms-down. The breathe better than leather or rubber gloves and grip and protect much better than cloth. One of those simple improvements that make you wonder why they didn’t appear sooner.
Those do sound good…but are they “thorn-proof?” The reason I wear the leather ones is because those awful prickly thorns don’t penetrate the palm when I’m yanking those weeds out!
I don’t know that I’d attack an old bramble with them, but they’re really great for pulling roots and the like. My wife wears hers while tending to the rose bushes, but our roses are fairly pathetic because of our laissez-fair approach to aphids. Leather still has its uses, especially when your hands will be covered in wet soil.