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Spring Cleaning

Jim Boxberger
Posted 4/28/23

With the days getting warmer and longer, we are spending more time outdoors getting ready for the season ahead. Spring cleaning is in full swing and I have been doing a lot of spring cleaning this …

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Garden Guru

Spring Cleaning

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With the days getting warmer and longer, we are spending more time outdoors getting ready for the season ahead. Spring cleaning is in full swing and I have been doing a lot of spring cleaning this year. 

After twenty six years of being in our house in Swan Lake where we raised our family, we are moving, but still in Sullivan County though. My wife would never agree to move away from our four granddaughters, but we are at that age when it is time to downsize. In fact our new house is about half the square feet of our current house, so we had to do some major spring cleaning. 

We accumulated a lot of stuff over the course of twenty six years, a third of which ended up in the garbage. After cleaning out the house, we started on the garage and the shed and that is where this column is going. You see, we found many items for the lawn and garden that had been forgotten about over the years. In particular chemicals and fertilizers. 

Now our garage is insulated and liquid insecticides and herbicides are good from season to season as long as they do not freeze. If you have chemicals that may have frozen, you might as well throw them away as even though they may still smell and look good, once frozen the chemical configuration breaks down and it will not work for the purpose you purchased it for. Every year I get customers in that complain that their insect control or weed killer just doesn’t seem to be working like it should. It usually turns out they stored their chemicals in a shed or garage that may freeze when the weather drops below zero. 

Dry chemicals and fertilizers are still fine if they freeze as long as they are kept dry. If they absorb moisture, they start to activate and breakdown. Those bags of lawn fertilizer that got left on the garage floor and absorbed water from the ice and snow that melted off your car are now useless, except maybe as a door stop as they are probably hard as a rock by now. I found a bag of Miracle Gro Lawn fertilizer in my garage that was so old it was from before Miracle Gro was bought out by Scott’s, but it was still dry, so it was good as new. But the garage still had plenty of old junk that needed to be dealt with. 

Old paint from years past, paint thinner, aerosols and other household solvents all needed to be disposed of properly, so check with your local municipality for their spring disposal days for collecting all these solvents that just can’t go in the regular trash. Old batteries and tires can be dropped off at garages that participate in recycling programs. I had a number of odd tires, no two were alike, that did not fit any of our current vehicles. I think they accumulated from my children over the years. Old tires can make great planters if you are a little creative. 

There are plenty of videos on Youtube showing how to transform old tires into interesting art and planters, as well as a good old-fashion tire swing. Besides cleaning out the garage, we had to clean out our shed and our yard. Our shed was full of stuff that we will probably never use again, like parts for a gutter we no longer have or a pool pump from a pool we had fifteen years ago. The yard was full of stakes and deer netting from the winter, not to mention our wood pile in the backyard and old kennel panels from thirty-five years ago when we used to breed Alaskan Malamutes, in a period of time we called B.C., before children. The kennel panels will find new life as a fence around the garden we plan on having this summer. Moving is not fun, but it forced me to do some major cleaning that had been pushed aside for many, many, many years. Now I can start all over again for another twenty-six years.

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