Gardening Hands

I was inspired to start this canter because I linked through Cottage Smallholder to Valley Farm and read about Mr Valley Farm using Superglue on his poor hands!

I have tried everything over the years, and now I just use a lot of expensive Calendula on my hands at night which seems to keep them more or less healed whatever I have been doing.

I normally wear Boots white cotton gloves (from the surgical area) under Sainsbury's green rubbery gardening gloves (from the home area and in HomeBase). They have stopped doing the gauntlet ones I loved, and now just do ones with little cuffs that don't suit my jobs so well; however, they are a bit more flexible.

I have tried barrier creams, vaseline and all sorts over the last 16 years -- mostly under my cotton gloves -- before I went out into the garden. None of them do any good, and I think that the reason for this is that I do so much digging and fetching and carrying that it's the friction on the tops of my fingers and especially the insides of my digit fingers and thumbs that makes the large, invisible 'blisters' that start peeling off days later, leading to these lethal cracks.

I also get one of these 'blisters' on the top of my thumb after a lot of driving and the cracks can go on for weeks. So, my new theory is that the gloves might actually make things worse, as it could be that it's the friction against the gloves that causes all this.

The best gardener I ever knew didn't wear gloves at all, but she had the ugliest hands out, I guess like Vita Sackville-West's might have been like. I have to take my gloves off when doing things like sowing seeds, and I am now thinking that I should wear latex gloves for fine work. And then, could I wear them under the gardening gloves for general protection? They drive me crazy, but then dentists manage. Waitrose do lovely packs of 20 and they are really useful. I think that dentists might have better quality ones that might let their hands breathe.

And as for those heavy-duty protectors like Germolene New Skin: well, they might do the job at the time, but you have to get it off for going to work on Monday or you look as if you have a very weird peeling skin disease. There is no easy solvent for it. On the bottle it tells you to use some fresh New Skin to take away the old (as if you would use some fresh nail varnish to take away your old nail varnish!).

And don't think that nail varnish remover will do it. I've tried it and it won't. Perhaps something like paint stripper would do it . . . .