Prepare for battle with our 314 Game of Thorns gloves

The Game of Thorns is an amazing new glove created by our Product Developer after one of our sales guys had repeated requests for it from garden shop managers in his Okanagan territory. As I have a cabin with a yard being taken over by blackberry bushes, I was excited to give the gloves a test run. Unfortunately for my husband, I only brought 1 pair of Men’s size down to the cabin last weekend. Now my husband is a tough-guy carpenter with a construction company and used to working with power tools and not the least bit wimpy, so he grabbed a pair of short leather gloves for himself and handed my son The Game of Thorns gloves. I, of course, dug in with the women’s size pair. Here’s the yard “Before and After” photos.

As you can see we had to take out the old tree fort and then cut down and yank out so many thorny blackberry branches that it took the whole day. Fortunately for my son and I, we had our gauntlet super Game of Thorn gloves on and came away unscathed. We were able to grab the thorny stalks and yank them out of the ground without feeling almost any thorns. My husband was not so lucky!

So, besides his arms being completely cut and scraped up it is important to actually think about the serious implications that could happen because he didn’t have proper hand & forearm protection. Getting a cut or scrape can result in a nasty infection. Sporotrichosis (also known as “Rose Gardener’s disease”) is a disease caused by the infection of the fungus Sporothrix schenckii. It can enter your body via a wound. Symptoms of this form include bumps in the skin, at the point of entry and also along lymph nodes and vessels. The lesion starts off small and painless, and ranges in color from pink to purple. Left untreated, the lesion becomes larger and looks similar to a boil and more lesions will appear, until a chronic ulcer develops.
If you get jabbed with a thorn, remove any thorn remains embedded in the skin and then clean the area completely with soap. Keep a sharp eye on your wound and if you observe signs of infection (increased pain, swelling, warmth, or redness, red streaks leading from the wound, swollen lymph nodes in your neck, armpits, or groin, or fever), seek medical attention.
Prevention is clearly the safest way to avoid gardening infection hazards and the number one way to do that is to wear gloves. A word of warning: stay away from those cheapy cotton gloves as they really don’t protect you from much. ]If you’re pruning choose leather gloves, especially the longer gauntlet models that will also protect your forearms. The Game of Thorns is the ideal glove to wear while tackling blackberry or rose bushes with their mighty thorns.