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What's in your shed? If it's anything like mine it will contain some (or all) of the following: tools (some hanging from nails, some lying around on the floor), mowers, plant pots, deckchairs waiting for a sunny day, three bicycles with flat tyres

. I think they feared being dragged prematurely into middle age. After complex labour negotiations we compromised with playing Steve Wright in the Afternoon on Radio 1.Radios are equally essential for potting shed and greenhouse jobs; pricking out

Many years ago when I was a landscaper in London, I had a regular client who had a tiny garden in Wandsworth. It was literally one flower bed, a small shed and a wall topped by a chain link fence.The reason we had to keep returning was because

are out there gardening (or those looking for an excuse to be out of the house - sometimes rain dripping down your neck can seem a much more attractive option than ironing).You could pass some time tidying the shed or pootling around in the greenhouse

The woods around us consist mostly of ash trees (Fraxinus excelsior), and every autumn we have a few weekends of frantic leaf collecting (particularly frantic around the chicken run). The trees seem to shed leaves at random – one tree

to be trusted with much, so we can relax, knowing that everything will fall into place and all we have to do is be useful when required and grateful on the day. This leaves me with the spare time to go and pootle around in the shed and look at tools. We have

(apologies to all those people standing ankle deep in post-flood sludge who probably don't need a smarty-pants pointing at the silver-lining).Lawns - because it has been well-nigh impossible to get the mower out of the shed, grass has grown much longer than

in such ghastly conditions? To fossick around on either border or lawn will cause more damage than good. You could tidy the shed or do some useful work in the greenhouse, but some days are too miserable even for that.Sometimes it's OK to say "hang it all

. The stems are at least 3m tall and they bear vast leaves. It needs a fair bit of water so I planted it just by a downpipe on the house so it gets lots of rain.My second star plant is Persicaria polymorpha. It is planted by the door to the chicken shed

are quite big and heavy some sort of staking would be advisable. Keep deadheading through the flowering season and dig up and store the tubers immediately after the first frost. By store I mean put them in a box of dry compost in a shed