Protect Your Hands with Gardening Gloves

Depending on how serious you are about your garden, you may have only a few gardening tools or you may have a wide array of tools including shovels, hoes, tillers, pesticide sprayers, or a tangle of hoses and sprinklers. It does not matter if you take immaculate care of your gardening equipment or if you abuse everything, all of these tools will eventually wear out and need to be replaced. However, you will want to make sure you protect the gardening tools (the most important ones) that are irreplaceable: your hands!

There are a wide variety of gardening gloves on the market today that will help protect hands and hopefully make your task easier. However, there are no perfect gardening gloves; each type is useful for different tasks and different budgets.

Different Types of Gardening Gloves

Your most basic and probably most widely used gardening gloves are basic cotton gloves. These gloves are extremely affordable and are sufficient for many tasks, especially as they are very form fitting. They are the most basic and provide only a minimal barrier between you and the dirt, weeds, and anything else you may have in your garden. The biggest drawback of cotton gloves is that they get wet easily and pick up a lot of dirt, which can make them a poor choice for planting if the ground is moist. Fortunately they can be easily washed, but they do not provide much protection if you are handling rose bushes, or other spiny plants.

Leather gardening gloves are usually much thicker and a little more expensive than cotton gloves, depending on what quality leather is used. Unlike cotton gloves, leather does not get wet and does not hold dirt, but leather cannot be washed either. Because leather is thicker, it allows you to comfortably handle roses, and absorbs vibration from gardening equipment like tillers or weed-eaters. Also, if you are driving stakes and miss, leather gloves will do the best job of protecting your hands.

Many people use rubber gardening gloves because they do not absorb water and can be cleaned by rinsing them off. Rubber gloves vary widely in price, but you should be able to find them in the same range as cotton gloves. Rubber gardening gloves are perfect for applying liquid pesticide, but you will want to wash the gloves off before handling any plants to prevent undesired exposure to the pesticide. However, rubber gloves can be punctured easily, depending on the quality, and since they do not let water in or out, users sometimes notice sweat collecting in their gloves.

While you may not need gloves every time you go to your garden, they do make many gardening projects easier, especially on your hands. Although there is no perfect glove for all tasks, any glove is better then no glove if you are at risk of hurting yourself, or are suffering unnecessarily. The type of gardening you do and your personal preference will determine what kind of gardening gloves you need.