Cleaning out - the shed

(Cleaning out my e-files in fact but this emerged, something I wrote for the NZ Gardener some time ago, about my shed and I thought, why not, so here it is!)

I’d love to do some ‘dawn raids’ , visits when they least expect it, on the garden sheds of a few well known garden celebrities. I struggle to believe they can really keep their sheds looking picture perfect, day in, day out; I know mines a shemozzle when the camera’s not around!
Getting through the doorway, while not impossible, is the least of the challenges my garden shed offers the optimistic gardener (me) looking for some useful tool or other. It should be easy, our shed is big enough. It’s an old railway-workers hut, with a curved tin roof, weather-boarded sides, two small four-paned windows and a door, only it’s always jam-packed and the thing I want is always at the back, under stuff. Our bee-keeping gear is in there - stacks of boxes, frames, wax sheets, the suit and the smoker and I’ve dozens of biscuit tins full of seeds I’ve collected from all over and stacked up on shelves ready to fall down on me when I’m hauling out the nets for the berry bushes, nets that always get tangled in the tines of the potato fork or the blade of the scythe. I’m not sure why we have three push mowers, but there they are. Our lawn is barely large enough to spread a picnic blanket on. Any one of the mowers is sure to be sat directly on top of the object I’m searching for and all three are heavy. But it’s the barrels of grain and mash for the hens that cause the most difficulty. They seem somehow to migrate to the centre of the floor, forming an impassable barrier that can be almost reached over, but not quite. When they’re almost empty, they’ll tip over and spill their contents surprisingly widely. A replacement tap, eventually fished out from behind the stack of rose-less watering cans will be crammed with wheat and the insides of gumboots lying on the floor will be ready to sprout.
I could paint tool-shapes on the walls and hammer-in nails to organise my hoes, spades, grapples and flanged-nibliks, but I’d only be setting myself up for disappointment. I’m not a systematic gardener and my garden shed is living proof of that. It’s fun in there though. Who knows what I might find in those dark and dusty recesses. One time, I found what I was looking for!