Andrew Oldham writes about Pig Row, which is three gardens over a quarter of an acre in Scouthead.
Visit their website at www.lifeonpigrow.co.uk
PUT DOWN the secateurs and revel in early summer. Get out the deckchair, sit down and admire the fire in your borders.
By fire I mean flowers and not an out of control barbeque. July is the month when half-scorched indigestible food becomes merely indigestion and the peace of our gardens is destroyed by two chilling words: school holidays.
Those of us with kids have to accept that our borders full of flowers and vegetables will be crushed by fast, uncoordinated feet. We will find our strawberries flattened by footballs and our clematis mysteriously torn down.
We will rarely see it happen and our only knowledge that it has happened will be through bellowed apologies from somewhere in our gardens.
Little kids are like ninjas in the garden. Pre-schoolers, like our son, can vanish in a blink of an eye. The only evidence they are still there are giggles emanating from the runner beans.
Even the famous doyen of the herbaceous border, Gertrude Jekyll, would have given up if she had found a snotty, cuddling crazed nursery class hidden beneath her Miss Willmott sweetpeas.
We are told kids and gardening do not mix but this is wrong. For all their hapless accidents with your zinnias, dahlias and peas and for every time they stumble and fall crushing your courgettes there is that moment when they discover watering for the first time.
There is a universal law for parents who garden: if you even think of getting out the watering can your children will appear from nowhere clutching their own watering can.
Between the barbeque smoke, the food poisoning, the decimated foliage of the school holidays you will find happy kids clutching brightly-coloured watering cans and happily drowning your plants – and that is the first step towards loving gardening.
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