Potting benches are one of the many staple pieces for gardeners today, available in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and they’re perfect for adding a little bit of character to your garden too. When keeping certain items outside all year long, you often have to consider how you’ll maintain them and protect them from different weather conditions. Maintaining your potting bench isn’t just beneficial for keeping it attractive and functional, but will also save you money later down the line.
Keep it Clean and Organised
When it comes to gardening, it’s very easy for things to become unorganised and messy, even when you’re trying your best to keep everything as neat and tidy as possible. Ensuring you have a neat and organised potting bench is essential to help you gain good results, as well as preventing your garden from looking messy. Start by cleaning your potting bench regularly, as this will ensure each time you come to use it, it’s ready for you to use. Cleaning your potting bench regularly will also prevent the materials from decaying and costing you more money on repairing the damaged areas. When it comes to organising your potting bench, keeping things in dedicated areas will help to keep the potting space available for you to use, as well as ensuring you know where everything is. Once you let the materials on your potting bench pile up in the wrong places, you’ll start to lose items and find it harder to carry out your gardening projects.
Wood Maintenance
For those with a wooden potting bench, it’s important to make sure you keep up with maintaining the material and keep it fresh and nourished. When you first purchase your potting bench, make sure its treated in a durable lacquer to protect the material from strong weather conditions, as well as to enhance the wood used. After a few months of living in the garden, your potting bench may begin to look worn and loose its colour, which is always going to happen with wood. To put the life back into your potting bench, give it a fresh coat of varnish to treat the material whilst adding colour back into the wood. This will instantly make your potting bench look brighter and new. You can then seal your potting bench with a varnish to prevent weather damage for a longer period of time.
Metal Maintenance
The way you treat and maintain your potting bench depends on the material used to produce it. If your potting bench is manufactured from stainless steel or other metal materials, there are a few ways in which you can maintain your potting bench to keep it looking bright and bold throughout the year. Whilst treating metal to wear well throughout the year can be tricky, there are things you can do to prevent it from rusting and becoming dull. Cleaning your potting bench with some bicarbonate of soda and water is perfect for removing any dirt that has gathered over the weeks, as well as removing tough stains. If you do this every month or so, your potting bench will keep it’s shine and stay looking bold and new for much longer.
Keep it Covered
With your potting bench living in the garden all year round, it is going to experience some heavy, tough weather conditions that may cause it to become dull and tired. A very good way of keeping the bad weather from directly affecting your potting bench is to invest in a protective cover, to position over the bench throughout the months you won’t be using it. You can even use old sheets to protect the material, anything that will cover the whole bench and shelter it from the tough weather conditions will help to keep it in great condition when the time comes to use it again.