First of all, put on your gloves!

Even if you’re just quickly pulling a bit of debris out from under your strawberries on your way out to dinner with the hub.

Debris as harmless-looking as this can put a real damper on a dinner date:

Case in point:  Hubby and I at a nice restaurant talking about the whole David/Bathsheba debacle. Hubby is in the middle of sharing an insight, I brush my dang finger tip against the dang tablecloth, ow!  What did he say? Ow! What? Ow, ow, ow, what?, what?, what? I could barely even see the dang splinter but oh could I feel it whenever it brushed against ANYTHING.

Upon returning home I inspected it under 10x magnification.  I could see it clearly protruding from my flesh, a nice, thick, chunky piece of pain. I grasped it with my tweezers but it wouldn’t budge.  I tried again and again and again and again and again.

Until my finger felt completely mangled.

I resigned myself to sucking it up and waiting for it to work itself out.

And then I brushed the splinter against my pillow.

So up out of bed I arose, grabbed the iPad off the nightstand, went into the spare room so as not to disturb the slumber of the hub, and googled “drawing out a splinter.”

There before me were several suggestions. I chose this one.

I placed 2 or 3 granules of Epsom salts against the splinter, wrapped a band aid tightly around them to hold them in place and went back to bed.

My finger started to throb. Maybe that’s what it’s supposed to do…. Off to sleep I drifted.

I kept the band aid on for a few hours this morning because it kept the splinter from catching on anything, hence no pain.

Then I pressed a key on my keyboard just so and OUCH!

Working again under magnification, I gave the skin around it a squeeze and more of the splinter came forth. One grab of the tweezers and out it slid.

I think the Epsom salts tenderized the flesh, softened it to the point that it loosened its grip.

So, there you go. A proven home remedy and a public service announcement:

Take a second and put on your garden gloves!

And have a happy Monday.

Oh, and if there are any gardeners reading this, I have a question.  I didn’t have any straw to keep the berries up off the soil, so I mounded pea pebbles just under the plants (so the runners can still attach themselves to the soil).  Like this.

Am I going to regret it?

I’m new to strawberries.