Never enough room!

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When we lived in Kent, our garden was quite a good size – the plot was 40’ X 200’ and I had a 6′ × 8′ greenhouse. This was fine: I enjoyed growing plants from seeds and plug plants, and tomatoes too. Then we moved to two-thirds of an acre in Somerset and, of course, I wanted (and needed ) a greenhouse!

So we went out and chose one – fine, you might think. First mistake – with a much bigger garden, I should have thought ahead and stretched the budget to buy a bigger greenhouse! We decided that a storage shed might help, somewhere to store pots and trays and other paraphenalia.

That did help a bit, admittedly, but I had plants overflowing from the greenhouse all the time… I called this ‘my Nursery’ and still do… read on…

Then when the greenhouse was bursting at the seams and some of the plants in the ‘Nursery’ needed more protection, I persuaded my husband that a cold frame was needed. So we went and bought one!

Was that the end of the story? No, no. Soon the cold frame was also full up. More seedlings were ready to be pricked out and more plug plants were on their way. What could we do? I looked around the work area – what if we moved the piles of slabs, sacks of ballast and lumps of blue lias stone left over from the building of the Garden room? Would a ‘wall garden’ fit against the back wall of the garage?

Hooray! It would – and shopping around really helped the depleted savings…the difference in price of the same model from different places was considerable! So what next? A bit of luck. FREECYCLE! A local factory was being stripped out and wood was there for the fetching, free of course. When my husband went to get what he thought would be firewood, he found that the factory benches were still more or less intact – so the trailer brought one home!

It was minus a top, but that was soon sorted. A potting bench was bought and shelves fitted, and it’s just GREAT! (Unless it’s raining…)

Yet more luck – another posting on Freecycle of an electric propagator no longer needed. And I was lucky enough to be chosen to receive this bounty! So there I am. all set up, with a full greenhouse, a full cold frame, a full wall garden and a full propagator.

I can’t fit any more equipment in. What am I going to do with all the Rudbeckias that need pricking out? Should I try to stop growing anything else? I can’t see that happening, can you? And yes, I am well aware how lucky I am to be so well equipped.

• 9 May, 2008
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