I watch quite a few YouTube Allotmenteers and it never ceases to amaze me how many are working away in what I would call pumps or tennis shoes but now I suppose are called trainers. I wear wellies or boots with steel toecaps and soles. One experience of treading on a nail is quite enough. It isn't the treading that is the difficult bit it is pulling out after that is the fun part. End of rant.
Couldn't agree more! I often see people round here pushing their mowers around wearing shorts and flip flops which is insanity to me. My 10 hole steel toe cap work boots that I normally wear to dodgy punk gigs have served me well so far. I think rigger boots are great too as you can slip them on and off like wellies. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Fed up with wearing steelies all the week, make my legs ache, so tend to wear trainers in the garden. Just a matter of being careful really, how anyone manages to run a mower over their foot is beyond me. A garden fork through the foot, now that sounds more likely, and would probably miss the toecap anyway.
I wear trainers for general pottering, mowing, even using the strimmer. On my land though, where there is much greater 'diversity of surface', it's my big dm steelies. In my silliest antic, I once took the chainsaw up on my own because my mate who was meant to be helping bailed out. I was on my own, with a chainsaw, in trainers. One of the logs I was cutting then nipped the saw, jamming it. Of course it was still running, because they're on a clutch to prevent stalling, so I did my usual stupid trick. Give it full throttle, while kicking the offending log. Sure enough, exactly as expected, the jolt to the log combined with full throttle on the saw was enough to dislodge the saw and free the now raging saw. NOT as planned however, having kicked the offending log, another log fell, hit my leg, knocked me off balance, causing me to stumble, and the full throttle saw to run over my trainer. Extremely luckily for me, all the gods were either in a good mood that day, or preoccupied with ruining some other poor souls day, because I was able to lift the saw just enough as I was falling forward to ensure there was no pressure on it, so it didn't cut my foot off. I made a new rule then and there. Nobody on my land uses the chainsaw without steelies on.
I do my lawn at the end of the day, all my gears on but let's face it round here I'm lucky to see 1% wearing PPE, that goes for glasses with those lovely strimmers. I don't worry about it, what others do is not a concern to me to be honest.
What's the implication here, that there's a tendency for people to mow their own feet? I always wear a hard hat when hanging out the washing mind...
Actually I remember back in the 1980s, when That's Life used to be on. One of their many campaigns was to try to stop people mowing their own toes off. I seem to recall then announcing on the program that as part of their campaign, flymo had agreed to phase in flexible, retractable plastic blades instead of their fixed, steel blades. I remember seeing something on telly around the time, which might have been a mower ad, or might have been part of That's Life's campaign, where they mowed some wellies with the older design, and similar wellies with the newer retractable plastic blade design. The steel blades annihilated the wellies, whereas the newer design just bent around them and the blades retracted in. No damage to the wellies. I had a flymo with the retractable plastic blades for a while. Nice idea, but utter rubbish. The blades wore out very rapidly, and any imperfection in the lawn (mine had many), and the blades would go into hiding. You then had to turn the mower upside down and reset them. I wonder how many people would have done that while it's still all plugged in and ready to go. Which takes me onto one safety point I always, always do. When making adjustments to any mains power tool, including unjamming/unblocking things, sorting the string feed on the strimmer etc, I always, always, without exception, unplug from the mains first. I still have all my fingers.
I use steelies when doing heavy work . Otherwise its an old pair of trainers or Crocs , I never ever could master flip flops !
Good warning Clueless! I worry about my other half when he's sawing up logs for this reason. A good reminder to us all.
I don't do that much heavy work these days. I wear old flat bottomed slip on leather shoes that used to be my going out shoes. When they get a bit scruffy looking then they become gardening shoes....they go on for years like this getting more and more comfortable.......and more and more scruffy until finally they develop holes and start to leak. That's when I say goodbye to them but by then there is another pair in waiting to take over the gardening shoe role.
I wear my Hunter wellies (with holes in) or hubby's rigger boots for digging, strumming & cutting the grass, the rest of the time I wear my trainers or flip flops. If I'm using the petrol strimmer I wear boots, jeans/overalls & a safety hat which has ear protectors & a face guard..it makes me look very attractive....not
When I was renovating parts of the garden and doing heavy digging and tromping in all kinds of unknown stuff I used heavy duty boots, still use good footwear for digging and turning over soil etc. Now the serious work has mainly been done I use slip on cloggy things or an old pair of shoes - I find it such a faff using lace ups as I'm in and out of the garden a lot during the day. Agree though I've seen people doing serious garden work with hefty tools with flimsy footwear on, madness really. GG
