Get Yourself Some Gloves!

There is nothing fulfilling about squishing your hands through dirt and scratchy plants, and then coming inside from your gardening day with crescents of black under your fingernails and dirty wounds on your hands. Unless, of course, you're into that sort of thing. If you're like me, and at the very least have tired of nail brushes, gardening gloves are for you.

There are different types of gloves, from the cheap ones you can pick up at the Dollar Tree or Daiso, to expansive and expensive leather gloves from "fine retailers." It really comes down to what you garden and HOW you garden.

My three-year-old rose gloves with their holy fingers.

 I bought rose gloves with gauntlets in 2013 to protect my hands and lower arms when gardening my succulents (yes, they came in handy with the couple of rose bushes I have, too). When trimming an agave, or when doing ANYTHING with a euphorbia, the long gauntlet pieces are invaluable for protecting skin from serious thorn damage and sap burns. After three years (which is pretty impressive, considering how I treated them) my rose gloves were a mess and had little holes at the fingertips.

It was black crescent nails all over again, so I did some research and looked at my gardening habits before purchasing new gloves. I ended up with:

The elegant lady's choice...

1) A brand-new pair of my favorite rose gloves. Really, the leather gauntlets are amazing, there's great flexibility in the fingers, and they were quite a reasonable price at Amazon.

You can pretend you're Wolverine! Well... sort of.

2) A pair of rather ugly "Honey Badger" gardening gloves which only make me feel slightly like Freddy Krueger. Why the ugly? They come in a plethora of colors, but of course, I went for the cheapest ones. You have the option of choosing either hand for the "claws" or even both hands, but I went with the left as I'm right-handed. They were a fantastic choice and will ensure the life of my precious gauntlet gloves by doing the dirt-related stuff the gauntlets weren't meant for.

The plastic claws on the gloves are PERFECT for digging into the dirt. I've been using them while upgrading my backyard planter in preparation for some hand-me-down box turtles I'm receiving next week. I can easily pull the ground cover back from the actual soil in order to plant new plants, or to install the water and feeding dishes.

Depending on my purpose, I will wear either set of gloves. For above-the-dirt work, like trimming or staking plants, or snail-hunting for my future turtles, the rose gauntlets. For weeding and planting, the badger gloves. Gloves are great no matter what you use, but from experience I recommend buying leather or plastic, as woven-fabric gloves leave tiny holes for dangerous sap to sink in through.