The organic gardeners out there are going, “downfalls?  what downfalls?”  The good far out weighs the bad when it comes to gardening organically.  However, there are times when you find that all of your hard work and diligence is a big pain in the butt.

Earlier this Spring I went into my potting shed to retrieve a tool, toy or other item throw in there over the Winter.  There was this odd aroma emanating from the shed, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I didn’t think anything of it and went about my business.  A few weeks later I was doing some cleaning up and looking for sprinkler system parts to work on the vegetable garden system.  That smell was still there.  I did a little investigating and found droppings.  The smell was rat urine.  Lovely.

Evidently the rats that were vacated from under our house when the cats moved in decided to snack on our bags of corn gluten all winter long and had made a nice little home for themselves in my potting shed.  I did the best I could do to clean up the mess and I threw away any remaining corn gluten (so sad, it’s such a great pre-emergent).  From there on we went about our merry business.

For most of the summer I haven’t paid attention to the smell or the recurrence of other rat droppings.  Anything I smelled I just chalked up to formerly peed upon wood or droppings that I didn’t get with previous sweepings.  Mostly, I wanted to ignore the fact that there was or still is a rat living in my potting shed.  This afternoon I’d had enough.  The smell finally got to me.  I’d also had enough of sitting at my desk and staring at the computer while the sun was shining.

I spent most of the morning emptying the contents of the shed out into the back garden and disposing of anything that had come in contact with any rat poo.  This included nursery pots and leftovers from a previous garage sale.  While cleaning I came to realize that I hadn’t just done a poor job of cleaning earlier this Spring.  My little vermin never moved out.  He just substituted my expensive corn gluten for only slightly less expensive organic lawn fertilizer.  I thought I had foiled the beasts when I put all potting soil and fertilizers into a Rubbermaid container.  Nope.  They climbed right in and helped themselves.

The rest of the afternoon I spent vacuuming up rat poo and power washing the inside of the shed.  I had dirty rat poo water raining down on my head.  I think it was the single most disgusting thing I have ever done in my entire life.  All in the name of organic gardening.

This weekend we will be making a trip to IKEA to purchase a metal bin to put any future lawn fertilizer in.  Hey, it worked for the bird food.