I grew up in plant nurseries (mum was a nursery manager) and the key thing I learnt was to make everything easy for yourself. Life gets busy and it’s easy to get behind if you keep putting things off because it’s a mission. For the one I’m building now, I am making sure my potting bench is at a good height for me (I’m short) and I can get easy access to it for dropping off bulk potting mix. Make your bench quite deep so you can load up plenty of potting mix if you don’t have a self filling bench. A rubber mat to stand on makes a lot of difference if you spend a lot of time there. Have enough space so you can load your plants straight onto a trolley or into trays to minimise double handling. Have all your supplies (labels, secateurs, garden diary, moon calendar pens, tape, pots, etc) for doing cuttings, grafting, potting up, and so on within arms reach so you can easily access them from your potting bench. Have a big bin for green waste under the bench so you can keep tidy as you go when doing cuttings and pruning. Have good access ways between propagation house and shade house. If you can, put these close together. My propagation house will have solar powered irrigation system and misters so I know my cuttings and seedlings are staying moist all day while I’m out with the children. Plus a hose for my permanent garden beds. Good ventilation is super important in poly houses. Put in a fan if you need to. If you can, metal nursery benches make for less bending over and are good for ventilation and keeping your poly house and shade houses clean (reduces fungal and pest issues). If I think of anything else I will add it later (my coffee break is over)!

What a great set up! I did one term of setting up gardens in a Montessori school (then Covid hit) and I found that it didn’t take much to get community/child engagement. What we often take for granted is really new for a lot of others so it’s very exciting for them before you even start. I had little tasks and weekly leaders who would look after watering, slug/snail monitoring, weeding, etc so the children felt a sense of connection and ownership which they seemed to enjoy. We also ‘danced’ for the plants after planting them and I encouraged talking and connection with them. We were going to do an experiment where one garden was mostly ignored (just basic maintenance and care) and one that we played with daily and see if it made a difference. On rainy days we painted plant labels on wooden spoons to help the children remember what we planted. Or I got the children to design their own gardens and we would discuss them together. We talked about all the different aspects of gardening and plants from the soil up. It was great fun, I am looking forward to doing something like this again in our homeschool community.

@Sam Betteridge we didn’t end up doing it the experiment (just planned it) I wasn’t allowed on-site anymore and we started homeschooling.

All of the jobs 😩 I’m just using it as a good motivation for my rehabilitation journey 😬😅

I have a syntropic food forest that I installed a few years ago, mostly got it all wrong but now fixing my mistakes with a much stronger understanding of how these systems work. Not sure if that would be of interest?

We have a multiple projects going on here, but in the simplest version, we would like a space that we can use to teach others who want to take what they learn here home with them so they feel inspired and confident to start their own gardens.