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You love to garden and you need to buy a new shed or you're finally taking the gardening plunge and thinking about buying a greenhouse. Wait! Have you thought about buying a potting shed? Here we look at the Top 5 Reasons to Buy a Potting Shed and show you some of our favourite potting sheds. Our garden expert then shares his real top reasons for loving a potting shed. Curious? Read on to find out more.
Let’s start with the Top 5 Reasons to Buy a Potting Shed:
1. It’s the best of both worlds
A greenhouse and a shed rolled into one: a dream combination. With the glass front to support plant growth and a 3-sided area to store all your garden tools and paraphernalia, a potting shed does twice the work. All those bags of compost, piles of empty seed trays and rolls of twine that would normally be on show in a greenhouse are tucked neatly out of sight. This leaves your plants to take centre stage. Plus, it's a great value way to get the benefits of a shed and a greenhouse all at once.
2. Seeds, seeds, seeds
A potting shed is ideal if you love to get seeds going and don’t want to leave all those seed trays on windowsills in the house. Admittedly, if you want to be growing loads of produce that requires warmer climes, a greenhouse will offer far more space and sunlight. However, if you’re happy setting plants off, then a potting shed is a perfect choice.
3. Shelves, hooks & organisation
You can’t hammer a hook into a greenhouse panel. Low level shelving is OK in a greenhouse but potting sheds can have super practical tall shelves secured to the wall. Hang that greenhouse thermometer, add a decorative "Life's a Garden - Dig it!" sign and shelve your horticultural magazines. Pop your favourite trowel on a handy hook and you are sorted!
4. Warmer in winter
An excellent benefit of a potting shed is that - though the full glass of a greenhouse means you get a more powerful result in summer and spring - the 3 wooden sides of a shed do keep the temperature warmer in late autumn and winter. This makes it the ideal place to keep your more vulnerable plants. A potting shed is the perfect place for overwintering plants and bulbs. Make sure the windows of your potting shed are facing south for optimum light.
5. Relaxation
Who wants to sit on a comfy chair reading the latest seed grower’s magazine with a cuppa while in full view of the whole family? Move from the greenhouse into the potting shed and you’ve got a private place to relax.
Some of Our Favourite Potting Sheds
The Traditional Potting Shed
Available in four different sizes, this potting shed has a charming stable door, weathertight 12mm tongue and groove cladding throughout and an integral potting bench. For more details, click here.
The Shire Sun Pent Potting Shed
Tongue and groove throughout, the Sun Pent has a long run of windows and an integral potting bench perfect for starting off those seeds. It comes in four sizes and has a 10 year guarantee. For more details, click here.
The 10x11 Rowlinson Corner Potting Shed
With its unique corner design, this impressive potting shed has plenty of storage room, double doors plus a charming curved greenhouse area. The robust tongue and groove wall cladding and attractive apex roof make this a super choice for your grow your own ventures. For more details, click here.
The Windsor Greenhouse Combi Shed
If you want more greenhouse than shed, this design from Windsor offers a spacious wooden greenhouse with convenient rear storage. It features numerous windows including two to the storage space. For more details, click here.
Our Garden Expert's Alternative Reasons to Buy a Potting Shed
A potting shed is vital to a well-balanced life. Here's why:
1. Refuge: a potting shed is ideal to escape the tension and pressure of everyday life. They are a place to potter. Plus, in a big argument you can hardly storm out of a room saying ‘You’ll find me in the bespoke kitchen with central work cube with adjustable height control preparing a light supper’, or ‘If anyone wants me I’ll be in the sun-drenched lifetime guarantee conservatory tending the orchids.’ Sometimes only a good solid ‘Oh I’m off to the potting shed’ will suffice. Fact. Try it. Next time you have an argument.
2. Storage: where else will you keep your antique collection of nuts and bolts, drainage pipe brackets and watering system connectors (none of which are actually useful or relevant)? And those boxes. The ones that will come in handy one day. That day will never come. But you will be ready. I bet Samuel Beckett wrote his plays in a potting shed.
3. Perfume: there is nothing like the smell of a potting shed. That combo of 2 parts petrol, three parts cut grass and a soupcon of engine oil is divine. Potting Shed pour l’homme? J’adore PS? Oh yes, you know that you’re worth it.
4. Security: bicycles cost a fortune and cannot be left loitering against a house wall or chained to a drainpipe. The bikes will get nicked. So will the drainpipes. Even the wall in some areas. Lawnmowers cost a few quid so need the comfort and security of a potting shed. Locks, alarms and lights are all easily fitted.
5. Library: in the old days (or ‘currently’ if your Wi-Fi router booster doesn't boost your route that far) a potting shed was the perfect repository for old newspapers, magazines and periodicals. And there’s a word used way too infrequently these days. Slumping in a saggy chair with the latest copy of Ferret Fanciers Fortnightly has to be one of joys of the garden. Remember that tablets (not the ones for gout) are good but can be damaged by the various exudates from number 3. above.
6. Shelter: everyone needs a physical shelter in a storm and standing, dripping wet, gently steaming watching the stair-rods of rain hammer into your perishing plastic cloches is one of life's great comforts. Add in a mug of tea, the whiff of Potting Shed pour l’homme and that unexpected storm is a delight. No potting shed and you would have to race back into the house, de-boot and to be honest, you never get that enthusiasm for weeding back again. Not with the orchids to tend. A potting shed is your gardening saviour.
7. Legacy: ‘that was dad’s / mum’s/ granddad's/ grandma's/ insert suitable name or familial position here’ is surely something we all aspire to. OK, it might be as other family members knock it down with lump hammers to make way for the latest trampoline or super frothy, double-bubble, disco-lit hot tub, but you will be happy in the knowledge you have made your mark on the world and the garden. Don’t be upset if you watch all of this from the lounge window. Trampoline and hot tub users have no respect for potting sheds and won't wait for you to turn your back before demolition starts. Just make sure you get your forty-year collection of Ferret Fanciers Fortnight tightly bundled and boxed up and get out quick. Then rummage in your drawers, find your budgie smugglers (the ones with the perished elastic) and invite friends and family into the hot tub being delivered over your house roof. Suddenly, the potting shed was indeed nirvana.
8. Work: a potting shed can be adapted to be a work place. Electricity can be installed, insulation stuck in and a few pieces of suitable furniture or equipment and hey presto - it’s a home office; gym; dance studio; little factory churning out bespoke nick nacks for next to nothing. Anything is possible with a potting shed. Just make sure the council knows what you are up to, to stay on the right side of the rules and regulations. And neighbours, especially if it involves noise. Or those Speedos. Or both.
9. Wildlife: a well-worn, oft used potting shed is a haven for wildlife. Spiders, moths, mice, rats, a fox, a trapped robin (sorry - it must have nipped in when I wasn’t looking and then I locked the door for the night and I’m not kidding, it was livid in the morning. Or was it just a wild bird?) all inhabit potting sheds. And if you didn’t have a potting shed that same wildlife still has to find a home. Would you ever share your bed with a fox? Don’t answer that.
10. Potting: I know, a shock inclusion but a potting shed can be used to pot up plants. Given big windows, plenty of clear workspace and a few hours and you can do a lot of planty type stuff. It keeps the sun-drenched conservatory clean and the bespoke kitchen spotless. And gives the wildlife company.
As you can see, potting sheds are so much more than just a place to pot plants, so what are you waiting for? Now's the time to explore Buy Sheds Direct's superb range of potting sheds and purchase your own invaluable potting shed today.
