Spring gardens pain ACC

Spring is around the corner with danger lurking in the garden shed.

ACC figures show springtime garden and outdoors injuries reached into their thousands during that season in 2015, when there were almost 700 lawnmower accidents in a single month.

Even rakes accounted for more than one injury per day - but gardeners dug themselves much bigger holes with spades and shovels.

Spare a thought for the gardener who got hit in the face by a rake and another - while raking whose eye was poked by a tree branch.

They were two of the 99 rakerelated claims in the three springtime months of last year, sparking claims worth more than $40,000.

Spades and shovels - triggering 959 claims and costing ACC $430,000 - cause injuries including ‘‘caught leg on side of spade’’ and ‘‘pushed spade into hard ground and felt back go’’.

Drills, though, caused some of the nastier-sounding injuries - as the person who drilled their ankle, injure, as the person who hurt their elbow while pulling a weedeater cord, and another who injured their rotator cuff when starting a lawnmower proved.

Weed-eaters caused 202 injuries from September to November last year, while lawnmowers caused 1811 spring injuries.

The figures suggest a mid to late-spring flourish in New Zealand gardens - with lawnmower claims leaping from 476 in September to 685 in October and 651 in November as Kiwis tackled their belated garden growth.

Likewise, weed-eater injuries sky-rocketed from 43 in the first month of spring to 92 in the last, while the garden rake injured just 25 people in September but 40 the following month.

The old whacked thumb with a hammer injury got a notable mention among the 1107 hammer claims that spring.

ACC pointed out the figures could be slightly unreliable as they were found in the database using a ‘‘free text search’’. That would mean, for example, a chainsaw injury may not show up if the term ‘‘chainsaw’’ was not used in the claims form.