The potting shed: sheltering from the rain and musing about the garden

[ComeIntoTheGardenMaud]

Years ago, there was a potting shed in which we could recline on slightly faded deckchairs while browsing bulb catalogues, so might it be time to re-open it? I’ve hung some bunting at a jaunty angle and put the kettle on, so come in and tell us about your summer gardening joys (or woes) or plans for the future.

All welcome.

Oh this is so timely for me! After a 2 year nightmare deciding to move - one major reason being I wanted a garden having virtually none at last house - going through selling our house which was not straight forward and buying which we are on our 4th house/attempt, and nearly a year in a rental (was meant to be 3 months max) we finally have a completion date next Thursday!
We will be moving into a house with the nicest and biggest garden I've ever had.
I am beyond excited and totally up for this thread! 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱

Hello! Thanks for the thread, excellent plan. I moved house in January after 18 years in my previous house. Previous garden was a weed infested patch, and I loved turning it into my haven of tranquility, as my mum christened it. The new garden was interesting - previous owners concreted the lot! Three layers of reinforced concrete removed; countless skips and lots of mud, and now we have grass and a hedge 🥳 It's very odd starting from scratch - I'm used to dividing perennials and putting them in bare patches, but I've had to buy so much. Tempted to go around the local park with secateurs for cuttings! It's a very heavy clay soil, which is tricky, but I'm very happy with my humongous project.

@YourSpleenIsDamp that's very brave of you taking on a concreted garden!
I turned down places on the grounds the garden couldn't be sorted and concrete would have been a big no from me. So well done and I look forward to a couple of before and after pics if you feel like sharing them.

Hello! Welcome!

It’s a long time now since I started this garden, but I do relate to that daunting sense. The house had been empty for a while and all we had was an apple tree, a peony and yards of ground elder. It’s been a long haul. A garden is never truly finished, I know, but I feel I’ve reached that stage where the heavy work is mostly done and I can just tweak it year by year.

Hello, how lovely to be in a potting shed on this rainy day.

Hello! I’m delighted to see the potting shed swept clean and opened up again! I’ve brought a packet of Digestives to have with the tea, and a tray of surplus Venus Fly Traps left over from all the summer plant sales.

I have had my current garden for thirteen years. It had good bones when we moved in, but a lot of overgrown and overtired shrubs and not much colour. I installed paths and changed the proportions of borders to improve the overall geometry, ripped out a long hedge-gone-feral of Leylandii trees to let in light, added a second patio and built a pergola.

I gradually worked my way round, replanting all the borders. I made a ‘hot’ border, a spring border, a winter border, a stumpery filled with ferns, and my personal favourite, a series of rose terraces.

It all peaked about three years ago when after much harassment locally I opened up to the public as part of a charity Open Gardens trail. It was a glorious day despite the massive stress of getting everything looking good all at the same time!

From those heady heights, things came crashing down when honey fungus struck. I have spent the last two years digging out and burning plants as they expire. I have lost dozens of roses, nearly all my peonies, three trees, several shrubs, and now the Wisteria on the side of the house is on its way out.

I’ve been a bit depressed, lost my gardening mojo, and am trying to be philosophical. The potting shed reopening has come at a good moment! I’m sure hearing about everyone else’s gardening triumphs and travails will give me a much needed kick up the bum.

@VenusClapTrap 💔

Ooh hi 👋
@YourSpleenIsDamp I’m in sort of the same position. At the end of our garden was a neglected, weedy, crazy-paving-over-cement area about 10mx10m (guesstimate). We have spent the last few weeks levering up slabs, reusing what we could elsewhere in the garden and filling a skip with the rest. It’s amazing what we excavated - an old cast iron fireplace surround, many many old bricks and bits of old greenhouse. What a perfect time to sit in the potting shed and think about what next.

Did someone mention Digestives?

I’m sorry you’ve lost your gardening mojo, VenusClapTrap, but perhaps we can offer encouragement and solidarity. I felt similarly aggrieved when I had to remove the box hedge I’d nurtured from cuttings, but now am quite grateful for the extra planting space that gave me; I have a very small garden so every fatality represents a new planting opportunity.

Some before and during photos! Will find some of how it looks now, and hopefully post more as it progresses 🤞🏻

That is so nice to see someone digging up concrete and replacing it with garden @YourSpleenIsDamp !

That concrete garden looks familiar @YourSpleenIsDamp did you post about the house when you were buying it? Your lawn is lush!
Our new house has quite a bit of lawn, but we're thinking of getting rid of most of it and going plant-heavy with Japanese style chippings between.

Our garden has taken (for various reasons), almost 16 years in the making and still not at the maintaining and editing stage. Please let me know how long your gardens have taken in the creating and give me hope. VenusClapTrap, I think a lot of us lose our gardening mojo at some point , but you sound an amazing gardener and will bring your special garden back to life x

VenusClapTrap that's so tough, sending much solidarity.

The garden we made here was intended not to be labour intensive <hollow laugh>. This year I have been trying to reduce the number of pots to water, with some success, but the dry weather has meant watering the raised beds also, so the watering is still taking a huge amount of time and feels like outdoor housework rather than gardening.

The best thing that I have grown this year are the dahlias I raised from seed, a Sarah Raven packet, which are planted in nine large pots at the front of the house. They have looked lovely, although would have been better had I fed them more often.

Pulls up weeding stool, takes off muddy gloves. Mutters darkly about dahlias and snails.
Nice idea for a thread.

So following on from my wild excitement yesterday about finally getting my new garden next week, and on receiving an email from Gardening Express yesterday full of offers, I made a big unrealistic wish list of plants that this morning I've whittled down to a mere 14 plants at just shy of £100.
Before my itchy order finger loses control, oh wise fellow potting shedders, am I going a bit over the top seeing as we haven't even moved in yet?
Or contrarywise, should I liberate even more of my wish list into my actual basket while the prices are sooooo enticing?
Talk me down, or talk me up?

Cuppa anyone? It's nearly elevenses time!
I'll have to bring my own biscuits because I'm gluten free. I make a mean gluten free Victoria sponge though, and I'll happily bring one along one day soon when I'm not trying to plant my vast and profligate order and get my new garden shipshape. 😂

Wanders in swearing about tomatoes, and fretting the pumpkins I promised the grandkids will die before Hallowe’en.

I’m currently weighing up the cost of moving vs the plans I’ve drawn up for renovating our garden, and wondering which is least likely to end in divorce.

Heldinadream - I’ve rarely regretted my impulse plant buys, although it does depend a little on whether you have somewhere to park them until they can go in the ground (and can remember to water them if you’re busy with other things).

I’ll join you, BestIsWest, in muttering darkly about dahlias and snails. I bought three new dahlias this year, after succumbing to the blandishments of Farmer Gracy. Two have romped away but, every time the third breaks through the soil, it’s reduced to a stump by molluscs. Even my homemade garlic gloop hasn’t deterred them, grr.

<<gratefully accepts tea and biscuits>>

@ComeIntoTheGardenMaud yes, plenty of room to park them on the patio. I've got pots so I can pot them further up while I think about where they're going. I won't forget to water them either!
Anyway I bought them. 😂 Of course I did.

Sorry to hear you lost a dahlia to snails. I suspect this thread will mention snails a lot. I've got a good snail meme somewhere, I'll look it out. I try and avoid plants that other creatures like to eat but hey now I've got a bigger garden that'll get harder.
Delphiniums were the biggest disappointment when they got munched. Never again!

Yes, I mostly cope with slugs and snails by not planting their favourite plants - I learnt my lesson with delphiniums and lupins - but couldn’t resist jumping on the dahlia bandwagon. I wish I could work out why they demolish some but leave others alone.

I volunteer in a garden project where they have a fantastic display of dahlias this year and they seem to be snail free so I have serious envy. I adore delphiniums and lupins etc but I’ve learned as well. This year the little bedding dahlias in pots seem to have thrived but the beautiful Bishop of Llandaff has finally been defeated.

Bloody hate snails. But I hate slugs more, because they don’t even have a nice looking shell to show off.

my garden is a work in progress; much loved by a keen gardener 30+ years ago, then left to overgrow whilst the house was rented out, now being pruned (with an eye to getting all the brambles) back to some kind of shape. I spent most of covid lockdowns sifting determinedly by hand through the soil to get rid of ground elder weeds; it was most satisfying.

im actually lusting over the idea of a real life potting shed, but I can’t quite justify the expense.

I’ll bring a flask of filter coffee and some hobnobs

I’ll happily accept a Hobnob now the Digestives are finished, thank you!

I gave up on Dahlias, Lupins and other snail food years ago. The ones that really pain me, that I wish I could grow and keep repeatedly trying with tragic results, are Achilleas. They’re not supposed be prone to molluscs, but they seem to be a delicacy here.

This week I am feeding some cats while their owners are on holiday. One was awol yesterday so I went round the garden calling her. What a garden! It’s in an old sand quarry, and is full of lots of twisty little paths, precipitous steps up and down into different areas, including a sunken rose bed, a hidden pond, fragments of old box hedging and what looks like it was once some kind of flat rectangular games lawn - croquet or something, possibly.

Apart from a well maintained area of lawn and flower beds next to the house, which they obviously use regularly, the rest is rather neglected and overgrown in an enchanting Secret Garden kind of way. Lots of very old gnarled tree trunks blocking paths, that are already hard to walk on as roots have pushed the flagstones out of kilter. Mature Acers leaning out over the banks here and there, and a massive disused greenhouse lurking in a sunny spot, empty except for stacks of dusty plant pots.

I felt like an excited child, and almost forgot I was on a cat hunt.

Pulling up a dangerously creaky folding chair, offering around some GF cornbread, avoiding mentioning my overgrown patch ... "it's for the pollinators".

How very lovely to be here again with the mature stems and some new shoots. Can we find Humph's original thread or would that be weird? I think I had a different name then.

Hi 👋 Poking my head in to ask if I can join? All my plants are in pots and I’m on year 3 of learning my how to grow things as I had no garden before.
I try and grow a mix of herbs, flowers and a bit of food. Snack cucumbers were a big hit this summer.
Ive also created a little ‘gardening corner’ in my garden with a potting bench, small greenhouse, a rocking chair and table and edged it all off with large planters. Would be lovely and peaceful if it wasn’t also DS’s favourite place to be!

I love the idea of that garden Venus - I don’t know anyone who really cares about their gardens, everyone I know has either concrete or a plain lawn and nothing else.