Outhouse Tool Shed


This month’s Design Workshop at http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=1935#more-1935 calls for sharing our outbuildings and sheds. One of Nan’s suggestions is “a tool shed that masquerades as an outhouse.” Well, instead of a tool shed that masquerades as an outhouse, we have an outhouse that masquerades as a tool shed.

As with many older homes in our area, ours came with an outhouse. In New Jersey, it is illegal to build an outhouse, but it is not illegal to have one. So, we did what most people do, just kept repairing it. At our place, we never have just your ordinary anything.

When the original flat roof could no longer be patched, Dan decided to make a garden feature out of “the little house.” He learned a lot when he put the first replacement on; no need to dwell on that. Suffice it to say that this is the second attempt, made with very thin shakes that were applied to plywood that had been bent to the desired shape. He turned the building around 180-degrees, so that the back faces the garden. The outhouse now stores the multitude of our purchased and inherited long-handled tools.

The little closet on the side was added to hold a small spade, the poop patrol picker-upper, and two garden forks, which are used to turn the compost pile, out of view to the right. The wreath is a castoff from friends who moved to Florida and has held up surprisingly well, having lost only one or two pinecones in more than 10 years.

Attractive all year-round, the outhouse-toolshed perches on the cliff and stands like a lone sentinel keeping watch throughout the winter. Come spring, phoebes usually find their way under the eaves to lay their eggs and raise their young.

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which ...
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery...
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have...
Keep reading