I have added gloves to the tools section as they are so important for comfort, protection, and grip gardening.  Yes you can do gardening without gloves, but I have found that using a wheelchair, gloves that have a bit of ‘grip’ to them not only helps with pushing the manual wheelchair around in the garden but also helps me hold onto the tools easier.  Having arthritic fingers means that I can’t grip as well as I used to and I kept dropping my tools, especially the unmodified ones. In both my front and back gardens I have some prickly shrubs so gloves can offer a bit of protection from these when weeding around them, and clearing their fallen leaves.  

Gloves that I wear when gardening from my wheelchair

As you see from the gloves pictured, I don’t have any heavy duty gloves which would offer good protection.  I just can’t be getting on with them.  I can’t feel what I am doing, and pushing the chair is more difficult with them, so instead I would just use my pruners and secateurs that’ cut and hold‘ to tackle any prickly shrubs so that I don’t have to touch them at all.  If I am just going to do some sweeping up or scraping in between slabs in the garden, then I will use either my lambskin gloves or my Global leather wheelchair gloves (if they are drying off then I will use any old leather gloves or my old biker gloves).   They not only keep my hands warm and clean,  but also help my grip and prevent blisters.  I won’t even pick up a cane without gloves on now after I had a very nasty infection in a finger from a skelf (splinter).  It was extremely painful, required antibiotics (which mucked up my warfarin INR), and made it painful to do any wheelchair transfers. 

Over all my favourite gardening gloves are the pink Show-341 gloves. They are flexible, light, breathable, have a textured waterproof latex covering on the palm, and are machine washable. They offer some protection from small prickles such as nettles, and have a good grip.  However, they are not totally waterproof and don’t have any padding on the palm, and can still be a bit slippery once they are wet but they do still offer some grip when wet. The rubber does wear off especially when pushing a wheelchair but then I can use them in the house when it is freezing or when I am playing with the dog throwing his ball around the house.

The Global leather wheelchair gloves have padded palms which not only help with grip but protect your palms getting sore when manipulating objects.  

Broken blood vessels on fingers

This picture shows my painful burst blood vessel and some other blood vessels near the surface which often burst when pushing the chair. This one burst when  I was pushing a metal plant support into the earth. If I had been using my lambskin or Global leather gloves then maybe that wouldn’t have happened but I was just using my showa-341 gloves.

The main trouble I find when using gloves with a wheelchair is that the grip goes as soon as they get wet.  I have found online some gloves from macwet that claim to keep their grip when wet but I haven’t tried them out.  Once my hands get wet they get very cold and I have not yet found any  gloves that are waterproof and that have grip when wet.  

Therefore I would suggest you always have a good selection of gloves so that you always have some dry ones available.  You need some that offer padding and more protection for certain jobs in the garden, but some lightweight gloves with grip for most of the light everyday gardening jobs.