Life on Pig Row

As many of you know, my wife and I gave up the town way of life in 2009 and moved to a rural area, a thriving town is nearby but our immediate surroundings are cows, sheep, horses, seven neighbours, one road, a pub and chickens. We took over an old cottage house and garden; a garden that had been untouched for thirty years. During the last twelve months I have been keeping a visual record of the changing face of this garden from bramble patch to crab grass hell. This has been accompanied by notebooks full of ideas, plans, redrawn, rewritten, ripped up. In a moment of elation I pitched the idea for a series of articles to the Cottage Garden Society, on someone growing a garden from scratch, from seed and cuttings. They accepted. From 2011, I will appear in the CGS magazine and readers will see my ups, my downs and my sideway steps around gardening on Pig Row (this was the original name of the cottages I live in). I advise all keen gardeners to join CGS, it is only £9 a year and I have had a great time being a member.