Potting shed heaven…

A chap can’t feel like a chap without a potting shed, and mine’s been a long time coming. Oh, I’ve had sheds aplenty over the years, but somehow they always seem to fill themselves with clutter. A shed specifically for the potting of plants is a luxury indeed, a statement that you’ve somehow reached a turning point in your life; a certain age - and it seems that I’ve grown into a chap of a certain age.

A shed is a sanctuary, a place to go when all else fails, a bit like a church. It’s a space to calmly contemplate, a place of peace, quiet, and order. Or at least it should be.

Just how a tidy shed gets messy is one of life’s great mysteries and I’ve never managed to solve it. Over the years my sheds have seemed to explode internally the minute the door has been latched for the night. A jumble of this, a mess of that – it’s a bloody nightmare looking for the charcoal, impossible to shelter from the rain inside the chaos of its bursting confinement. Swing a cat? Not even a mouse.

Anyway at last, courtesy of my mum in law, I now have a shed specifically for the potting of plants; I am a rich man indeed. No matter that it leans and that I have to travel a couple of miles up the road to access to it; it’s worth the short journey to lurk in the dimness and breathe in the smell of damp compost. Besides the vegetables I’m raising are being grown in her garden, so what better place for my potting shed?

Of course I had to clear it of rusting garden recliners, curtains, Christmas decorations, old roof tiles, and spiders first - most of which hadn’t seen the light of day since the eighties. But once I’d assembled my Aldi potting bench and manoeuvred it into place, it seemed to be a more than serviceable space, ideal really.

Potting is the thing to do when you’re not pottering, and somewhere between the two I should have a most enjoyable lark of a time. My dibber is at the ready, my seedling separator prepared, my compost blanket awaiting starter’s orders. All I need now is a portable radio tuned to Gardener’s Question Time, a bottle of port, a few wet late spring afternoons, and I’ll be in potting shed heaven. I may buy myself a gardening cap to wear whilst I pot away and I've even made a little wooden sign for above the door.

Potting, pottering, port, and a portable - what more is there to wish for?