The excitement! The anticipation! Shed Week 2008 starts on Monday, and we sheddies are in a frabjous state. Shed Week celebrates the importance of the shed, hut or gazebo in our culture as a place of refuge, storage and amusement. On July 8, the winner of the Shed of the Year will be announced. Nearly 1,000 sheds are presently in the running, and as you can imagine, tensions and jealousies are building among shedophiliacs throughout the land.

I am writing this in the balmy late afternoon on the allotment in Cricklewood – to compose this article from anywhere else would be sacrilege, and now I’ve got one of those dongle wi-fi thingies, I can visit Readersheds.co.uk and Shedblog.co.uk directly from my shed to share sheddy thoughts. Plus, I can water the tomato plants.

What I need is a table. Obviously I have the gothic, red velvet skip-rescued chair to sit on, but if further literary works are to be written, I need proper support. My own shed is peculiarly cruddy, and is not in the running for Shed of the Year this year. But with a little work, this 6ft x 4ft space could yet be considered a palace. The Dig for Victory posters are up, a shredded Saltire is waving from the pea-fence, and although the shed is painted allotment-regulation green, I am considering a blue and white striped door, to give it the look of a marooned beach hut.

The problem is that there’s barely room to swing a seed packet in the tangle of hoses and tools around the Woolworths porta-barbecue and the push-me lawnmower. I also feel the shed might be less shoddy and skew-whiff had we built it when sober. On the other hand, it serves its purpose perfectly, a cheerfully inadequate haven for a cheerfully inadequate allotmenteer. (I forbear to tell you of the horrors inflicted by bindweed and banana-sized slugs upon my courgette, lettuce and pumpkin seedlings when I couldn’t get here for three weeks recently.)

There is some sadness in the shed community this year, ever since the razing of the Manor Garden Allotments for the London Olympics. They should have left the patch exactly as it was, an organic, drug-free, go-slow zone amid the Olympic concrete and pomp. Tourists could have peered at the allotments and the gardeners could have pretended to be ye olde medieval serfs. An artist, Jan Stradtmann, took eerie, silvery photographs of the Manor Garden sheds at night before they were crushed, and you can see them on the Photographers’ Gallery website. Perhaps a posthumous Shed of the Year award should go to one of those.

Last year, the competition winner was a shed-turned-Roman-temple, with four fibreglass columns, mosaics, frescos, amphorae, blue LED mood lighting and a burglar alarm – all a bit too gussied up for my liking. In some way, it lacked elemental shediness.

I feel sheds should feed into that great instinct, that caveman DNA that tells us to build shelter with whatever comes to hand. When are small children happiest? When handed a big hammer, a mixed bag of rusty nails and some sticking plasters, and allowed to build a den from scrap. When are grownups happiest? When playing in their sheds. On the shed websites, there are sauna sheds, eco-sheds with grass roofs, pubs for two with barstools, workshops and even a recording studio, with its own video on YouTube.

But on the whole I prefer the proper, purposeful potting sheds of my fellow allotmenteers in Cricklewood. The éminence grise of the allotment has a double shed with comfy chairs, a bottle-gas cooker – and a library (of veg lit, available for all to consult). He also – and many of us are very jealous of this – has a Portaloo. The transplanted Irish all seem to have two or three sheds made from discarded house-parts or shipping containers. There are many cups of tea taken on home-made cushioned banquettes.

There are tidy sheds, with labels and objects hung on pegs, and exotic havens with Indian wind chimes, from which one allotmenteer wafts amazing cooking smells at about seven in the evening, and offers you a taste of his huckleberry jam. (Who knew that you could grow huckleberries this far from America? But with watercooler bottles as cloches, it seems to work.)

Here, in the world where real men make jam, shed decoration still shies away from the over-feminine. There are unwritten rules for interiors, which you somehow absorb with the stink of rotting compost. Ambitious improvements are fine, so long as the material is recycled or stolen from building sites. But were you to lose touch with your skanky side and go the full Cath Kidston, you’d probably get torched one dark night.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk