Greenhouse Tables: Maximise Your Staging Space

Whatever type of greenhouse gardener you are, one thing is common to all of us, and that is that our greenhouses are never big enough. At least until it comes time to tidy them up.

A great way to maximise the available space is to use greenhouse staging and tables to make the most of it. Metal greenhouse tables can be adjusted and set up to suit many different growing methods and changed to fit the seasons too.

Using the available vertical space in your greenhouse can make it more productive and easier to organise.

Greenhouse Potting Tables and Pottering

The potting table is arguably one of the most important pieces of equipment in your greenhouse. It’s often the first thing you and your visitors see, at the door as you go in. It makes sense for access to both indoor and outdoor plant potting.

The potting table is often where you will keep your tools, watering can, and other items, but no one pots up their plants all year round, do they? The growing season may extend a few weeks into the Autumn every other year, but by Summer all the hard work at the potting table should be done.

Most of the time this area is simply host to a pile of clutter from the last session either repotting seedlings or potting on last year’s top performers.

Change Up Your Greenhouse Tables With Simple Slats

The Copagrey greenhouse tables are a flexible system rather than a hard and fast setup. Once the potting season is done, the potting tray and solid shelving can be swapped out for the slatted shelving on the bottom shelf.

Pots, tools, and half-bags of compost, can all sit tidily down below while on top, the space can be given over to greenhouse-growing. The slats promote air movement and help sunlight filter through to lower levels.

The slats simply slot in, so if you are already at max capacity, just pop the potting tray in the garden store until you need it again in the new year.

Topping Out Greenhouse Tables

Some people say that the only way is up, and to take advantage of the higher levels in a greenhouse you need to use a hanging system. Not so!

• Table toppers are the safe, stable, and accessible answer that won’t put a strain on your greenhouse structure.
• They add another 40cm of height to your greenhouse tables, and at 24.5cm are deep enough to comfortably take an established 15cm pot, or a seedling tray, oriented sideways. 
• They are designed to fit on top of either a slatted or solid shelf. 
• Set one up over the potting table to give yourself extra work or storage space.

Tiered Table Toppers

Tiered shelving gives additional growing table space while maintaining as much access to light as possible. The topper shelves are half the depth of the tables they are designed to extend, and slatted, thereby letting light, and air by too.

Table toppers are light, portable and easy to deploy whenever, and wherever extra capacity is required, although we’re fairly certain that once they’re up, and in use they’re unlikely to be moved for a while.

Go Wide in the Greenhouse

If you are still in the early stages of planning your greenhouse adventure and have a limited area in which to site one, it’s a good idea to go as wide as you can. All walk-in greenhouses will have almost as much vertical space in them as floor area, so what impact can width have?

It’s quite simple. In a standard six-foot by six-foot greenhouse, there is room to fit tables and staging on two sides and still have enough access to work comfortably between them. 

If you can stretch the width of your greenhouse to eight feet, that will give you enough room for a third, middle-row, and at least another 40% additional growing table space.

The narrowest recommended space for two rows of greenhouse staging is in a five-foot-wide greenhouse that delivers a minimum of 450mm, or 18 inches of space between them.

Solid Shelving: Steel in the Greenhouse

Metal greenhouse tables can take a fair amount of weight, up to 50kg for a two-foot staging table, which is a lot of compost, and a good number of well-watered pots. 

Don’t worry about getting them wet either as they won’t rot or rust.

Solid shelving on the lower layers can help block light to the ground below the shelves and inhibit weeds, self-seeding and pests. 

It can also help catch excess compost, earth, or mulch, saving it from building up under the growing tables.

Maintaining a greenhouse is all about controlling natural forces, after all, giving the plants you need the best chance to forge ahead without unwanted competition.

Seedling Shelving

The job that gets every gardener enthused about the coming growing season is the sewing of seedling trays, watching and waiting for the tell-tale signs of germination. Having a seed table set aside for seedlings means being ready as soon as the winter frosts begin to wane.

There’s never enough room on the windowsills in the house. Invest in a seedling-specific piece of garden kit, that will look great in either a greenhouse or a conservatory, or even in the bay window in the dining room.

It’s hard to decide whether germination or harvesting plants is the most satisfying part of the entire garden season cycle. Watching seeds sprout, and come to life after arriving in a paper envelope from the garden centre, is often a magic moment.

Plan Ahead for Greenhouse Productivity

We can’t be in a greenhouse year-round, well, perhaps not as much as we’d like, so during those dull winter weekends take time to plan, month-by-month, what will happen, and where. 

Whether you are keen to get hanging baskets, borders, or the allotment going, a greenhouse offers the opportunity to get ahead of the growing game.

Make sure your staging space is maximised so your plants don’t become crowded out before they’re ready to go outside. 

Take the time to sort out your greenhouse tables so that they are ready for when it’s time to don the gardening gloves and open up the seed box.