BE PREPARED, BE SAFE

Be prepared in the garden

Friday August 29,2008

By Alan Titchmarsh

All sorts of little accidents occur out in the garden, especially in summer, when the pressure is off and you’re merely relaxing or pottering outside in the sun.

You know what it’s like: you spot a little job that needs doing and do it without stopping to think.

Every year no end of people who bend over to tie up a plant or nip off an errant shoot poke themselves in the eye with the tip of a cane they didn’t see and forgot was there. It’s easily done. Wearing sunglasses when you go round doing odd jobs is a great help, but better still put protective cane toppers or something small – even an old snail shell – over the tips of canes so you can’t hurt yourself.

Another regular incident is people snagging themselves on rose thorns when doing a quick bit of deadheading without bothering to get a pair of gardening gloves, and then they make things worse by pulling away instead of unhooking themselves carefully. It pays to keep your tetanus shots up to date – a lot of GPs insist on it when they know you are a gardener.

It’s much the same when you go to pull out a quick couple of weeds by hand, instead of fetching a hand-fork.

Odds are that that is when your fingers will find a bit of broken glass or a dead spiny stem that sticks in and breaks off under the skin

, I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that you stop giving in to spontaneous little gardening urges when you are “off duty” but what I would say is be prepared.

Keep some basic gardening kit handy by the back door – perhaps a garden apron or trug loaded with trowel, snips and gloves - so you can collect it up when the urge is upon you; you won’t bother if you think you have to rummage around in the shed for half an hour collecting up vital kit.

And have some sticking plasters and TCP or similar ready to deal with little accidents so they don’t turn into more serious problems. But at risk of sounding like a kill-joy, the moral of the story is “get in gear before gardening”.