A Potting Shed

It is official.  My garden shed is now a Potting Shed.

Before it was built, I thought of it as a potting shed.  But the reality of the shed was that it was more of a garden room/garden office/play house/storage shed than a place to pot up plants, start cuttings, and whatever else you do in a potting shed.  If I needed to pot up plants or start cuttings it was usually done on the patio, near the hose.

But recently, it was cold and rainy and I needed to get a lot of plants ready to come indoors for the winter.  That would involve dirt, rooting hormone, lots of dead leaves, water, and etc.  Rather than bringing the mess into my kitchen or dealing with the cold and rain outside, I moved my work to the dry, comfortable shed.

The potting table

Normally, this cabinet holds a tray of "curiosities" that I have collected -- leaves, tree bark, sea shells, a shed snake skin, pine cones, an abandoned hornet's nest, a robin's nest that fell from a tree in my yard, a dragonfly that died in my shed and other interesting natural things.  The tray was moved somewhere else in the shed and the cabinet became my potting table.

I stayed dry and comfortable while making my mess.  I had most of the tools I needed right on hand.  After each plant was re-potted and groomed of dead leaves, I put it outside the door of the shed to get a bit of rain before the whole group of plants was carried into the house.  And the mess was contained and easy to clean up.  Success on all counts!

Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) cuttings

Rosemary is not hardy in Southwestern Pennsylvania and my rosemary bush is now too large to bring in the house for winter.  This winter, it will stay outside, nestled in a pile of leaves in my composter.  If it survives, great; if not, I have cuttings that I hope will take and survive the winter inside.

Alas, poor Yorick!

Here's a very small sampling of my natural curiosities.  Pine cones, cob webs (okay, not actually collected by me), a dried up seed pod from a shrub that I have not yet identified, and a bird skull.  I am guessing that it is a robin's skull, because I found it in a garden where I saw a mortally wounded robin several months before.