L'abri de jardin

The garden shed. It sits out back by the gate that leads out into the vineyard. When we moved in, the door was busted and there were boards nailed up in its place. The shed was full, and I mean packed full, of junk. It was weeks before I could get up the courage to empty it out.

The shed last week emptied of most of its contents.

But when I did it was like an archeological dig. The shed had been closed up for years before we bought the house. There were probably more spiders inside the shed than anything else, along with dead lizards and rodents. Old broken and mended yard tools were stacked, piled, and hung everywhere. There was even a scythe (a scythe!) which I've kept just so I can say I own a scythe.

The shed contained boxes and jars and bags of fertilizers, insecticides, and other stuff that looked pretty scary. I got rid of the worst of it, but there is still some actually left that I thought I might one day use. I haven't.

The cleaned out shed, waiting for most of the stuff to be put back in.

The cleaning took about a week. Several trips to the dump later, I had organized the shed to hold our gardening tools, wheelbarrow, rototiller, and lawnmower. And other stuff. Since then (2003), I haven't cleaned the shed out again, although we did have a new locking door installed in 2004. I had good intentions to clean it out again last year, but never got it together. So this year, this past Friday, was it.

It didn't take much more than a couple hours to empty the shed and use the shop-vac to suck up all the spiders (living and dead), spider webs, neatly wrapped spider food (yuck), and spider eggs, and to sweep up the mess on the floor. Now I've got everything back inside and a small pile of stuff to cart off to the dump. And the shed is clean and pleasant once again.