Contrary to the opinion of children and teenagers everywhere, Gardening isn’t a job for wimps. It’s tough manual labour, and enough to take the wind out of the sails of evening the strongest and fittest of individuals. Your hands in particular take on a lot of the trauma involved so it’s imperative to invest in a good pair of gloves to prevent sweaty, blistered hands becoming a problem that halts your gardening efforts.
The trouble is most people don’t invest in a decent pair of gloves and end up suffering as a result. The default option is to choose a simple cotton pair. Cotton for all its benefits is pretty useless when it comes to gardening, it gets soaked through if it gets wet, it tears easily, and will generally wear out pretty quickly.
A much better option than cotton gloves is to opt for rubber coated cotton, or if you can spare the expense, leather gloves.rable than cotton gloves suffer from a distinct lack of breathability, and the feeling against your hands isn’t great. They’re resistant to tears, chemicals, and indeed they’re flexible too, but the problem we’ve often found is that they aren’t quite flexible enough. Some varieties are better than others in that the rubber coating doesn’t cover the whole glove, just the gripping side. Whilst this improves your freedom of movement, you obviously need to be aware that water can still soak the raw cotton side of the glove, and indeed this side will still be prone to tearing as well.
Leather gloves have all the same advantages as rubber coated gloves in terms of durability, but they have the distinct advantage of feeling more natural, and being more flexible. Goatskin is generally used to make leather gardening gloves, and indeed if you do a lot of work with sharp branches and thorns, you’ll want to opt for them from the get go. If you’re not too keen on the idea of wearing animal hide, then there are synthetic (presumably plastice) leather gloves that should do the same job. Although we would probably bet that these won’t last as long as real leather gloves.