Spend less time fumbling through your shed and more time in the garden
Some of the best parts about gardening are the thrill of plucking some freshly grown carrots out of the ground and the quiet solitude of digging and weeding on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Some of the worst parts involve digging through your shed trying to find that bag of potting soil you swore you had somewhere around here.
To help make your hobby even more enjoyable, you’ll want to organize your garden shed and maximize its full potential. Carve out a weekend to straighten out your space and follow these garden shed organization tips throughout the process.
Decluttering is key to any organizational project. Go through everything in your garden shed and sort things into three piles: keep, donate, and trash.
Get rid of broken tools, gear you never use, and expired products. Be realistic about how much soil and mulch you need, and consider splitting with neighbors and friends if you bought too much. Who knows? During this part of the process, you may find old favorites like dull garden tools you can sharpen so you can enjoy them again.
If you’ve never organized with pegboards before, you’re in for a treat. These simple organization tools involve a large board covered with an array of evenly spaced holes. You can hang all of your essential garden tools on them using small hooks. This system keeps your tools out of the way and allows you to take advantage of vertical wall space instead of leaving your tools to clutter up your potting bench or workbench.
Try hanging things like trowels, small shovels, pruning shears, and more here. Just be careful when hanging sharp tools that they’re not in a place or a position where they’ll catch on your clothes as you walk by.
You can also use shelves to take advantage of vertical space. You can either build your own shelf system or purchase one at your local home store. Store individual bins or buckets of all of your must-have garden tools and organize them by task or type.
Depending on how sturdy your shelves are, you can also store bulky items, like heavy bags of soil. Keep in mind that you should always store heavier items on lower shelves so that they don’t fall on you (and everything on the lower shelves) when you go to get them down.
That being said, you should also avoid putting heavy items on the very bottom shelf if you have chronic back pain or mobility issues. Otherwise, you could throw your back out when grabbing them. Placing them about 2 feet above the ground should do the trick.
Shovels, rakes, hoes, and other long-handled garden tools can easily clutter up your garden shed. Organize your garden shed by installing a garden tool rack to hold long-handled tools upright and out of the way. The painful days of tripping over your rake are in the past.
Long cords and garden hoses are ultra-convenient, but they’re awkward to work with physically. A great way to store them is to wrap them up into a round bundle. Mount hooks onto your garden shed walls (an outside wall might be better for garden hoses) and hang the wrapped cords and hoses on them.
Be sure to wrap them up after every use to keep your garden shed organized and ensure they’re ready to use the next time you need them.
If organizing with pegboards wasn’t enough to wrangle all of your garden tools and supplies, try organizing with magnetic strips. You can buy them at almost any home improvement store—look for strips that look like rolls of tape. Stick them to your interior garden shed walls and use them to hang your metal tools.
You can use these strips to keep your tools at arm’s length. Place one above or beside your potting bench or workbench and store things like scissors, hand tools, pliers, and other small garden supplies. Place another strip near the door to hang up your keys or store everyday tools, like metal rulers or a pair of shears. Another strip could hold all of your screwdrivers. There are virtually endless possibilities—check out these storage shed ideas for inspiration.
If you’re serious about getting organized, you need a label maker ASAP. But if you don’t have access to one, a simple note on a sticky label works, too. It doesn’t matter which of these routes you take as long as you label absolutely everything. Label shelves, bins, boxes, and any other container to indicate what belongs in or on that space. This step gives everything in your garden shed a home, making it easy to keep the space organized and clutter-free.
Once you eat the last pickle from the jar, you can use it to store screws, nails, and more. Keep the lids closed so that the contents don’t spill everywhere if you accidentally knock the jar over. And definitely keep the lids closed (tightly) if the items inside are sharp. Stepping on an errant nail is not fun.
Drawers are a great way to keep tools and supplies organized in your garden shed, but they can quickly get cluttered if you don’t have a system in place.
If you use a drawer system to store your items, consider using organizers within the drawers themselves. Sort through what you have in there so far, get rid of trash and things you don’t need, and then set up your drawer organizers to keep similar items together. With drawer organizers, you can keep your washers separated from your nails and find everything with ease.
