If you love gardening, you’re probably imagining all the amazing things you’ll grow throughout summer and into the fall: salads full of leafy greens, fresh tomatoes, and cucumbers, stir-fries featuring zucchini, summer squash, and carrots — all grown in your backyard.
Before you can enjoy the fruits of your labor, you must plan, prepare, and plant. But when you step into your garden shed or the corner of your garage where you store your gardening tools and supplies, suddenly you’re overwhelmed by the tangle of tools.
What’s a gardener to do?
Organizing Your Gardening Tools
When you’re faced with a need to organize a space, it’s tempting to hop on Pinterest or Google and explore fun storage ideas. While those pallet hacks are cute, you’ll usually find yourself with an even bigger jumble if you try to fit your tools to a design idea rather than your design idea to your tools.
The number one mistake people make when organizing anything is starting with containers or storage solutions before they’ve assessed what they have to get organized.
Assess Your Garden Tools
With a project like this, it’s easy to get distracted—especially if your garden tools are in the garage. Remember to stay focused on the category you’re working within, and you can always come back later to tackle other sections.
Depending on your workspace, pull everything out so you can assess all your supplies. Then, begin sorting materials into categories that make the most sense to you. When sorting, it’s important to group things together in ways that you know you’ll look for them when needed.
Example categories:
- Hand tools (trowels, weeding tool, garden fork, hand rake)
- Long-handled tools (shovels, rakes, hoes)
- A grab-and-go bag or bucket (trowel, gloves, knee pad, clippers)
- Supplies (watering can, buckets, pots, fertilizers, soil, seeds)
As you sort through your supplies, remember to discard anything that you no longer use.
That broken tool you keep meaning to fix but never do? Toss it.
If you have four rakes but only use the bow rake and leaf rake, then donate the other two!
Discarding the excess will help you keep your garden tools tidy.
Get Creative With Garden Storage Solutions
Now you can begin implementing some of the cool ideas you see on Pinterest! It can be fun to repurpose old pallets to create a handy wall-mounted tool rack or hang a pegboard for easy access to your most-used tools. But remember to choose practical ideas that are functional, not just cute.
A few suggestions:
- A rack that separates your long-handled garden tools so they don’t become mixed up again.
- Hooks to hang things on the wall — always use the vertical space!
- Label everything! Your future self will thank you next year when you can easily locate that elusive pair of pruning shears.
Ready, Set, Garden!
With your garden tools neatly organized and labeled, take a moment to celebrate! Getting things in order will save you tons of time (and frustration!) this gardening season.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some weeds to pull and flowers to tend to. Until next time, happy gardening!
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