Shed

I must say, one thing about having an old dog who's fickle about her walks is that I get a lot more time in the garden. And this is not a bad thing. Yesterday I spent all morning pottering around (and where else does one potter, except in a garden?). Weirdly, I can't remember my specific activities except deadheading the roses, but I did a bunch of stuff.

That's our Rachel de Thame lupine, above, finally at full mast. We have one more lupine still to bloom -- our yellow one. It had a bud but it was late in coming and the flower is taking more time, for some reason.

I do remember my major task of the morning yesterday:

This horrible mess was the interior of our patio shed, a tiny, narrow, roughly two-foot wide structure built onto the side of the house. (In the "side return," in fact -- the scene at the top of yesterday's post is behind the shed, leading to the street.) Doesn't it look like the scene of a cataclysmic event?

I'm typically a neat person, but for some reason my habit with the garden shed is just to throw things in there willy-nilly -- particularly plastic pots, of which we had about a million.

So yesterday, I pulled everything out of the shed, swept the concrete floor, organized the contents, threw away a bunch of stuff including at least half of the pots and five old yard waste bags, and put what we wanted back inside. And we wound up with this:

Much better! I don't have any illusions that this will last, but at least now I can reach stuff on the back shelf. You can't see the shelf because it's above the frame of the photo above. So here...

...is a close-up.

Aren't you glad you read my blog?

Seriously, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment getting this monumental task done. There are a couple of things still to be addressed (of course). One is a lawn mower that was hidden beneath all the debris in the shed. It's a small thing that looks like an orange UFO with a handle, mostly plastic, and we've never used it -- it came with the flat. I'm not sure it works and I can't imagine ever mowing the lawn with it. I wrote the landlords and asked if I could get rid of it, and they said yes. So I'm going to put it on Freecycle (along with our own old mower -- at the moment we have three mowers) and get it out of here. Ditto our old garden hose.

I also planted some jimsonweed (datura) seeds that I collected and saved from the plant I grew last year. I have no idea whether they're even fertile, but we'll see.

We Skyped last night with Dave's parents, who have come up with a whole agenda for our trip to Michigan at the beginning of August. And I've been texting with my brother, who says Mom is still improving and hopefully will be getting out of the hospital today. Fingers crossed!