Q Greenhouse or potting shed: which is best all year?
Becca, by email A
ANNE SAYS If you only have room for one, I’d definitely choose the greenhouse. Fitted with staging, a greenhouse can be a potting shed but not vice versa. Even unheated, it can be used in winter to shelter slightly tender plants such as cannas, agapanthus, olives, ginger lilies and potted dahlia tubers. Just drape fleece over plants in long freezing spells. Cuttings of hardy plants often root better under unheated glass, where you can regulate their watering. Just keep plants well spaced and open vents a crack to provide air circulation.
In the new year, you can make early sowings of crops like broad beans, chard, lettuces and parsley in a greenhouse. Then, as the weather warms, you can sow all kinds of veg and flowers for the garden. By mid- to late spring you could be growing tomatoes, basil, cucumbers and physalis under glass for tasty summer crops.