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Best gardening gloves in 2023: Tested and rated | Tom's Guide

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We tested a range of products to find the best gardening gloves you can buy Insulating Gloves

Best gardening gloves in 2023: Tested and rated | Tom

If you want to work on your garden this summer, you’re going to need a pair of the best gardening gloves. Wearing a good pair of gardening gloves is just as fundamental as using the right tools in the yard. They protect your hands from discomfort and damage, while keeping them clean and dry. Plus, the best gardening gloves will be breathable, with adequate grip. So, whether you’re doing heavy work, or moving delicate seedlings, you’ve got the dexterity and protection required. 

But, with there being so many different types of gloves on the market, how can you tell you’re getting the right pair for the job? That’s where we can help. We recruited Farmer Rich, a seventh-generation fruit and vegetable farmer, to test a range of gardening gloves to find those that provide the best performance. 

Each pair of gardening gloves had to endure a range of activities, from transplanting and harvesting vegetables, to pruning sharp thorn bushes. Work gloves were tested with more heavy-duty activities, such as shoveling compost and handling an electric weed trimmer. During these activities, the design of each glove was carefully assessed, factoring in the dexterity, comfort, protection, grip and breathability. Farmer Rich even looked for signs of shrinking and cracking after drying the gloves out in the sun once they'd been soaked. After extensive testing, the results were compiled to form the below list. These are the best gardening gloves.    

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After extensive testing, we found the best gardening gloves to be the 2-pack Amazing Stuff for You! Garden Gloves. These gloves offer pretty much everything you could hope for. They are comfortable to wear, provide brilliant grip, and are functional whether you’re working in wet or dry conditions. The thickness of the material is also just right for balancing protection with dexterity.

If value for money is what you’re after, then we recommend the G&F Rubber Latex Double Coated Work Gloves. With 12 packs in one set, you’ve got one pair for every family member, and thanks to its durable design and excellent grip, there’s little to complain about. 

The Amazon Basics Leather Gardening Gloves with Forearm Protection are the best rose pruning gloves. You don’t need to worry about any thorns, weeds or even angry cats scratching through the material. And yet, the grip and flexibility are still impressive, even when wet. Overall, they are extremely well made and should be in every gardener’s glove box.

We found the best work gloves to be the Bionic Relief Grip Gardening Gloves. Designed by an orthopedic surgeon with arthritic and sensitive hands in mind, these machine-washable gloves offer excellent comfort, grip, durability and dexterity, even when wet. It is as if they took the best parts of a gardening glove, work glove and athletic glove, and combined them into one super glove. 

The 2-pack Amazing Stuff for You! Garden Gloves are a well-designed nitrile coated glove that are both comfortable to wear and functional in use. The thin nitrile coating offers excellent grip and dexterity in both wet and dry conditions. These gloves are also thin enough that you can feel the delicate stems of vegetable and flower transplants, yet rugged enough to protect your fingers from scrapes, soil and spiky vegetables.

These machine-washable gloves worked very well for harvesting cucumbers and using pruners. Plus, the quality stitching around the wrist kept the gloves in-place. The gloves were able to perform basic smartphone touchscreen functions, although texting was a little cumbersome. Like most nitrile gloves, the mesh backing can let in some loose soil and mud. However, it allows the gloves to breathe so your hands don’t get too hot. Overall, they are a great pair of medium-duty gardening gloves that should last. For a 2-pack, and such a reasonable price point, the performance won’t get much better than this, which is why they’re the best gardening gloves.  

The G&F Rubber Latex Double Coated Work Gloves are heavy-duty gloves that come in a 12-pack, making them a great bargain for those who need a large number of gloves. Textured latex coating provides excellent grip on tools, plants and rocks, even when wet. They are thick enough to be warm in cold weather, but breathable enough to be comfortable in the heat. 

While inspecting multiple pairs of these gloves, we found that the quality of the stitching was not consistent — some had loose threads that would catch on your fingers as you pulled them on. The color of the blue latex also faded over time working in the sun, but did not impact performance. For the price (less than $1.30 per pair), neither of these imperfections were something to really complain about.  

These gloves worked very well with touchscreen phones and were comfortable to use. They performed well in all of the gardening tasks we used them for. Buy these gloves and keep a pair in your car, house, garage and wherever you might need them. These would be a great value for community gardens or beach cleanup projects with multiple workers as they are not expensive and are very durable.  

The Amazon Basics Leather Gardening Gloves with Forearm Protection are an overall fantastic rose pruning glove. Its soft goatskin leather with sturdy cowhide gauntlet provide protection from both thorns and noxious weeds. These are perfect for handling thorn bushes and yanking out stinging nettle alike. The gloves provided nice grip and dexterity while holding pruners, even when wet. They also performed well as claw and bite protection while trimming our unhappy long-haired cat, who got into some brambles.

These gloves required no ‘breaking-in’ period to feel comfortable. The water-resistant leather stayed soft and flexible, even after being soaked and dried in the hot sun. Although there was a little bit of seam poking on the inside of one of the fingers, it was minimal. All seams are double-stitched and showed no signs of fraying, even after moving rough stones. Ultimately, they are great rose pruning gloves and are bound to provide years of use. That’s why they make the best gardening gloves list.   

The G&F Florist Pro Long Sleeve Rose Gardening Gloves have the features of a heavy-duty work glove, but the protective gauntlet cuff of a rose pruning glove, offering the best of both worlds. All seams on this synthetic leather glove are double-stitched. Reinforced fingertips and padded palm pads allow you to use garden tools just as easily as yanking out stubborn weeds. The breathable mesh back made these gloves good for both warm and colder weather use.  However, the backing is not water-resistant.

Best gardening gloves in 2023: Tested and rated | Tom

Waterproof Gloves As with many synthetic leather gloves, there were some blackberry thorns that did manage to poke through, but it was minimal. We did find it to be a great glove for grabbing and removing overgrown zucchini and summer squash plants without getting a single scratch. Although the thumb was a bit large, the overall glove fits well. If you want rose pruning gloves, but don’t want leather, these are the ones to get.