Garden Gloves
Gloves are gloves, surely? - well no they are not all the same and if you want to protect your hands while gardening you will need a pair specially designed and made for gardening.
What Makes a Glove a Gardening Glove?:
#1. Protective Barrier: First of all its to provide protection against scratches and scrapes while providing a barrier for your skin against soil and dirt. This could be in wet or semi-wet conditions so the material needs to be impermeable. Some gardening tasks can be quite injurious, like pruning roses or pulling out prickly thickets etc. so you need to know the thorns and prickles won't penetrate your gloves easily.
#2. Dexterity: We have all seen builder's gloves, big, bulky, thick leather and other materials providing a suit of armour for the hands. But the downside of those is the loss of dexterity or the ability to properly feel what you are doing. Gardening is a mix of rough and delicate activities so the glove has to be a snug and tight fit to enable you to really feel what you are doing.
#3. Comfort: As we all know, gardening is rarely a five minute task and its very easy to spend hours on end in the garden, so you'll need gloves that feel good to wear over these periods. They need to breathe, be comfy inside and not easily accumulate grit and rubbish through the wrist opening.
#4. Durability: Gardening can be a rough exercise and the rubbing and scraping of soil, rock, stones, thorns etc. can degrade a pair of gloves quite quickly if they don't incorporate the appropriate materials. Cheap knock-offs might look the part but, make no mistake, they are desinged to wear out quickly - therefore allowing you to spend more of your money buying another pair.
Glove Types:
You'll find a range of gloves designed for gardening using a variety of materials and at many different price points.
Dipped: These are usually an elasticated mix of cotton and/or nylon type materials that have been dipped in latex or polyurethane to provide waterproofing and a bit of extra grip, durability and protection. They will usually be a very snug fit, will breathe failry well and have an ability to repel moisture, at least on the dipped areas. The downside is they will have a limited life-span, though the price you'll pay will reflect that.
Combination Materials: There are many different designs here that tend to be much smarter in looks with one of the materials often being leather. The other materials may be cotton, nylon or elasticated hybrid fabrics and they tend to be assembled with the materials located in places where their attributes are best used - e.g. elasticated backs and leather finger tips. You might also find wrist straps (or elasticated wrist bands) that keep the wrist opening tightly closed against your skin to stop debris getting in.
All Leather - Builders Gloves: Made to last and provide high degrees of protection but they rarely fit snugly and the loss of dexterity may not bother a tradie assembling scaffolding, but the keen gardener will want and need something more refined.
All Leather Garden Gloves: These will be top of the range, be a delight to pull on and provide all the key attributes - protection, dexterity, comfort and durability. They'll also look very good and if you keep them wiped clean and rub some dubbin in every few months, they may last you for many years, probably many decades.
Prices:
As with any product you buy, generally the more you pay, the higher the quality and the longer they last, so the overall value goes up the more you invest.