How to choose gardening gloves you will actually wear
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How to choose gardening gloves you will actually wear
The best pair of gloves is the pair you keep on, which sounds obvious and is the thing most people get wrong, because a heavy leather pair that's too hot and too clumsy for the job ends up on the bench while you pull weeds barehanded. So the question isn't which gloves are toughest. It's which ones you'll still be wearing an hour in.
Match the material to the job
A knitted glove with a nitrile or latex coating on the palm is the everyday one, and it's what most people want most of the time. You can feel a seedling through it, it grips wet tools, the back is open weave so your hands don't cook, and it goes through the wash. It won't stop a rose thorn, and it isn't meant to.
Leather or goatskin is what you put on for roses, blackberries and anything with a spike on it, and a gauntlet version that runs up past your wrist is worth having if you prune roses at all, because the scratches you actually remember are the ones on your forearm rather than your hand.
A full rubber or PVC glove is the one for wet work and for anything you'd rather not have soaking through, so mixing up a spray, handling manure, or scrubbing pots out. They don't breathe at all, which is fine for twenty minutes and unpleasant for two hours.
Fit, which matters more than the material
Too big is worse than too small. A glove with empty fingertips means you're gripping through a fold of fabric, which is how you get blisters in a glove, and it's also why people end up taking them off to do anything fiddly. The fingertips should reach the end of your fingers with nothing to spare, and the glove should stay put when you shake your hand.
Snug through the palm, loose enough that you can make a fist without the back pulling tight. If you have to work at getting them off, they're too small and you'll stop wearing them within a week.
The one with potting mix
Every bag of potting mix carries a warning on it about wearing gloves and keeping the dust down, and it's worth reading rather than treating as legal boilerplate. Damp the mix down before you tip it, keep your face out of the bag when you open it, wear the gloves and wash your hands afterwards anyway. It costs you nothing and it's the one gardening job where the glove is doing something more than saving your fingernails.
Making a pair last
Knock the dirt off before you put them away, because dry soil in the fabric works like sandpaper on the inside every time you flex your hand. If they're wet, dry them in the shade rather than on a hot tin roof, since heat is what makes a coated palm go hard and crack. And keep the leather pair for the jobs that need leather, because using them for everything is how a good pair wears out in a season.
Buy two pairs rather than one good pair. A cheap coated pair for the daily pottering and a proper leather pair for the rough stuff costs less over a couple of years than replacing one compromise pair that was never right for either job.
Shop related products
- Brunnings Premium Potting Mix 36L. Gloves on for this one, and damp it down before you tip it out.
- Brunnings Blood and Bone Based Fertiliser 5kg. Organic feed for beds and shrubs, and not something you want under your nails.
- Martins Organic Sugar Cane Bale 11KG. Mulch bale, and a pair of coated gloves makes spreading it a much better afternoon.
- Neutrog Whoflungdung Mulch 20kg. Composted mulch that goes on by the handful.
Did you know we also stock gardening gloves in store, along with Gardenmaster hand trowels and garden scissors. The garden hand tools aren't on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf, or come in and try a pair on, which is the only way to know whether they fit.
The mulches, the mixes and the rest of it are in the garden centre.
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I keep a good pair in the shed and a terrible pair in the car, and you can probably guess which pair actually gets worn.
Candeece
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