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For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the gardening season has slowed down. Many of us have tidied things up outside and readied things as best we can for the winter. Now we turn to celebrating the harvest and the holidays with pageantry and feasting. This means we lay aside our tools and remember our table manners; perhaps scrape the mud off our shoes and otherwise tidy ourselves up a bit. In other words, it's time to clean up our act, at least until seed starting time when we can go back to leaving that faint trail of vermiculite around the house!
Most gardeners in all probability "clean up pretty good" as the expression goes, but with one telltale exception: our hands look like something from Archie McPhee's. In my case, all went smoothly yesterday as we settled in for a festive Thanksgiving holiday dinner complete with turkey and all the fixings, until I happened to notice that my rough and grubby hands were, to be brutally frank, an unsightly addition to the table decorations. As I discreetly hid my hands in my lap, I was silently thankful that I did not have to make a formal display of them by performing a critical ritual such as carving the turkey or pouring tea. In a word, real gardeners don't wear dinner rings.
Normally I wear my calluses and ground-in dirt as badges of honest hard work and compulsive weeding and garden-tweaking, but sometimes it is just not desirable to subject others to hands like this. Non-gardeners are unsympathetic and advise us to wear gloves when we garden. They are right. But it's a little late now!
So what's a gardener to do? Well, for starters, we could try the basic technique of washing often and a lot using gobs of lavender soap and a sturdy scrub brush like those available through Shepherd's Seeds. The next step, I have discovered, is to scour both the kitchen and all bathroom ceramic tile with heavy duty cleaning solutions — bare-handed. This tends to dissolve the top layer of skin, along with that last stubborn layer of garden grime. (Don't try this at home. It goes counter to ALL label instructions and is very bad for you. But it works.)
Clean is a good thing, but it is not enough. If your nails are like mine and have been used inappropriately as stand-ins for tools ranging from clam diggers to trowels, you will need some cosmetic help. The modern wonders of science, including plastics, offer us a veritable cornucopia of choices! Survey these carefully here, because I honestly doubt they will be duplicated in ANY garden catalog.
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