Bench To Potting Bench

Another Sunday morning on Mill Green Allotment. This morning I re assembled the bench but as I already have a bench for sitting on this one is going to be used as a covered storage area and an onion drying rack located the back of the potting bench. 

I screwed on a couple of timber uprights to the front of the bench, then added a horizontal roofing batten between to support the sheet of twin wall polycarbonate sheeting that has been sitting next to the shed for the last couple of years looking to be used somewhere. I added a similar horizontal batten to the back of the bench.

I drilled and screwed the polycarbonate to the battens with cup washers so as not to split the polycarbonate and to spread the load in case of wind uplift. There is enough of a slope for the rain to run off, and to keep anything stored on the bench or below it dry. More by chance than design the taller flower buckets just fit under the front batten so whatever I store in there should remain dry and rain free.

At the moment the buckets are full of empty milk bottles awaiting sand. The broken brittle soft bricks (milk bottles full of sand) that were made in 2012 & 2013 have finally gone brittle and have started to degrade so as they split or break they been stacked in the greenhouse.

The sand has now been emptied into steel trays so the sand can continue dry out in the greenhouse. So the plan is to decant the dry sand into the new milk bottles on the next visit to the plot to refresh and increase the amount of soft bricks I have to hold down weed membrane and netting over hoops

The red container on the table under the bench holds empty pop bottle slug traps.

Bed membrane sheets left to dry in the greenhouse were brushed off folded and stored in the shed, and gradually the greenhouse is becoming less full and before next season will be ready to take the overwintering spring onions and walking onions that are currently housed in the Space saver greenhouse at home.