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Potting Green

In the recent weeks I’ve alluded to this awesome thing that Colby has been building me.  Well hold on to your britches boys and girls because the awesome thing is about to be revealed.  It’s done, we think (there may be future tweakages as needed), and fully stocked.  Drum roll please……….joy to the world…….drum roll……….introducing my potting bench:

It’s tucked right around the corner from the deck on part of our unused section of driveway.  It’s currently a little chaotic with all the bags of mulch and top soil hanging around but it will get cleaned up eventually.  Here’s a zoomed in view:

I can’t believe Colby just up and built this for me.  He’s amazing…or amaze-balls…my new favorite word.  I started off wanting to document Colby’s journey of building the potting bench and give you a little tutorial, which is one of my goals for the blog…more tutorials…but Colby is just too gosh darn quick.  It’s like when Samantha decided she wanted to be a lesbian.  And Carrie was like “You go to bed one night, wake up the next morning, and poof – you’re a lesbian.”  His building skills are like that…without the lesbian part.  You go to bed one night and then poof – there’s a potting bench.  Little did Colby know when he started building this is that I’ve been drooling over potting benches for months.  And the killer feature on all my favorites….this:

He read my mind.  It’s a grate in the bench surface.  You pot your plants on top of it, spill as much dirt as you like, keep a container of dirt below the grate, and it catches all your dirt overages.  Genius…genius I say!  So let’s take a little tour of some of the other features/organizers on the bench.  On the right side is where I store my tools.

Then up on the top shelf is where all the pots live along with a mason jar with seed packets awaiting planting.  Although, when the bench isn’t in use I tuck the jar away underneath the shelf.  I foresee the jar blowing off the shelf, crashing to the ground, and breaking into a thousand pieces.

All my tools (spades, scissors, plastic pots) live inside that little planter.  Recognize it?  It lived for a a few brief moments up in the craft room as a wrapping paper holder (back here).  Things tend to creep around our house.

Including this flea market watering can who has been known to hold flowers in the dining room.

Isn’t it convenient that the hose spigot is located above the bench?  Coincidence I think not!  And we have a spigot splitter (say that ten times fast!) so we can run two hoses off of it which is oh so convenient since one of our hoses is buried under the ground and runs out to the back garden.  Then underneath the bench are a couple of dirt buckets and my weeding basket.

I love to weed….true story.  Of course I couldn’t resist and had to take the bench for a test drive.  It’s still too early to truly plant flowers outside here in Maine but I couldn’t help myself.  So what if I have to bring my plants inside every night to avoid Jack Frost?  Totally worth it.

I planted a combo of pansies and creeping flox in the shed window box.

And some more creeping flox for the front steps.  Don’t mind the water stains on the pot.  One of the plants had an accident…it may have soiled itself…hahahaha…I am so sorry.

I know they’re odd plant choices but I really didn’t have any other options this time of year.  I have good intentions of transplanting the flox to a more permanent location later on.  Just an excuse to use the potting bench again!

Pssst…if anyone is even remotely interested in the how-to’s for building the bench, feel free to contact us.  We would love to dish.  I just don’t have all the photographs necessary to make up a true “this is how we do it”, Montell Jordan style, blog post.

Comments

  1. Very nice, I am sooo jealous. Maybe Colby would hire out one of these days. Pretty plants, mine are still in the workshop crying out to be planted, but you know we have to wait for Jack Frost to stop visiting us. Local shops are just now starting to get their supplies in, so things are still sparse up here.

    1. You should come visit us and “test it out”. Please?! Pretty please?! You’re so much better at gardening than me!

    1. Hey Lois! Unfortunately we don’t have plans for the bench. Colby tends to build things quickly on a whim and improvising along the way. Seriously…pile of wood…blink…potting bench. It’s crazy! But I would love to help if possible. Do you want measurements or other pics? Just let me know!

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Angie's Roost Campbell Family in front of home in 2021

Hi there! We're the Campbells. We traded in Maine city living for the country life in Vermont. You'll find us here fixing up a circa 1781 historic home, growing our own food, and filling this home with the memories and things that matter. Read more about us...

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