It’s pruning time of year. This is when I run around my garden in search of pruning shears, loppers, saws, sprayer, and all the other tools I need for my annual fruit tree pruning and spraying.
While tree pruning happens just once, I spray three times over six weeks or more using horticultural oil and copper fungicide to smother scale, mealy bugs, aphids, the fungus that causes peach leaf curl and lots of other overwintering pests.
It’s a good-sized job. Every winter, I promise myself that once it’s done, I’ll put everything away in an organized fashion for the next year. But somehow, when “next year” comes around, nothing is where I intended to put it.
Pruning is just one of the many winter garden tasks. This is our busiest garden season so tools get used a lot — cutting tools, pruning tools, along with digging tools, weeding tools… not to mention irrigation parts, sprinklers, hoses, and more. And all of it needs a place to live.
Years ago, one of my wonderful sons built me a pair of tool sheds in the narrow sideyard between our house and side fence. The sheds have wood bottoms and sides, covered in a roof of clear, crenulated fiberglass. Double doors open up to shelves and crates for storage.
Those sheds that did their job for a long, long time are now falling apart. As I dream about their replacements, I’m remembering the many wonderful sheds I’ve encountered in my travels.
I once visited a garden where the owners converted their in-ground Jacuzzi to a rainwater cistern. They built a toolshed over the Jacuzzi, complete with trap door to check the water level and run a hose to irrigate their vegetables. Garden visitors admired the cute little octagonal shed. They had no idea there was a Jacuzzi reservoir hiding below.
On a garden tour I lead to Philadelphia in 2019, my group and I swooned over the garden shed – more a cottage really – at Northview Gardens, home to my friend, the garden celebrity, historian, author, and all-around amazing Jenny Rose Carey.
Carey’s English garden cottage holds her very well-organized collection of tools. It also serves as propagation room, potting shed, curing room for Jenny’s vegetable harvest, and overall “she shed.” Outside the cottage are blooming window boxes, a deck with a cozy rocking chair, and carved “rose” fencing. Oh, how I wish I had space for a shed like Jenny’s!
While I dream of Jenny, I’m equally impressed by the plain practicality of the tool shed at San Diego’s oldest community garden. This shed houses tools shared by more than 50 gardeners so organization is essential. Two walls are lined in pegboard that hold hand tools, another supports tool hangers for long handled shovels and the like. A sign over top reminds gardeners to hang up tools when they are done. I might have to add a sign like that to my own shed, so I remember to hang everything back up.
On our Australia garden tour in October 2024, I encountered a simple garden lean-to with two walls of repurposed metal garage doors and a cover of corrugated metal. The shed is well out of the gardeners’ living space so they are spared the view of exposed tools, wheelbarrows, potting bench, and more.
If I had more space (and more money), I would try for a metal shipping container shed like one of my clients has. Talk about heavy duty! And heavy. And truly the only shed I’ve ever seen that’s 100% impervious to critters.
What tasks are you doing in your garden this winter? What tools do you need for those tasks? Join me and my colleague John Clements to talk about Southern California Winter Garden Care on Thursday January 16th at 7 pm on Zoom. Reserve your spot here.