Nursery Storage

A nursery generates a lot that is not plants: heaps of potting mix, stacks of pots and trays, labels, grafting knives, rolls of shade cloth, and the sprays and fertilisers used on the stock. Nursery storage is the building that holds it. Its job is not simply to keep the rain off. It is to keep four unlike groups apart from each other - growing media, containers and hardware, tools, and chemicals - because the harm each can do to the others is what makes this a designed building rather than a shed.

The chemical side sets the standard. Anything used as a spray or a treatment is kept in its own locked space, never on a shelf beside seed or media, and it stands on a floor that is sealed and liquid-tight, with a low kerb so a spilt container is caught rather than soaked away. Bare earth or unsealed wood sends a spill straight into the ground, which is why the chemical store is also set back - commonly 15 m (50 ft) from a private well and 30 m (100 ft) from a public one or from open water. It needs air moving through it, and a temperature held between freezing and about 38 C (100 F), so in a climate that passes either end it is insulated or conditioned rather than a bare metal shell.

Seed wants the opposite of everything else: cold, dry and sealed. Kept below about 8 percent moisture and under 4 C (40 F) in closed glass jars, it stays sound for years, which usually means a cabinet inside the building rather than a conditioned room. The usual failure is simpler than any of this: everything on open shelves in one room, where chemicals taint the seed and the media and damp and rodents work on the rest. Sunlight kills pots, trays and shade cloth, so plastic left outside is the other quiet loss. The building produces nothing itself. It exists for the growing operation next to it, which sets its size and position, and a store built to hold one season's pots is full by the second.