GROWING ON THE WEB

You moved to your current home on the beautiful moors east of Manchester in 2011, but had you any experience of growing your own before that?

My dad had an allotment in the Eighties – it wasn’t just the decade of leg warmers and mullets, it was also the decade of Heath Robinson greenhouses made from old windows. Imagine a childhood spent under a multitude of stained glass windows, watering tomatoes. Even now when I pinch out tomatoes I can still see that leaded stained glass greenhouse; it felt like I was gardening at a church altar. At the age of seven we moved, and the allotment didn’t come with us. We became a family of the gooseberry, rhubarb and strawberry patch but no more home-grown vegetables. I didn’t grow them again for 22 years.

What prompted you to move from your inner-city home to take up a life in the countryside?

It came to a head in my late twenties when I sustained a spinal injury. I ended up with curvature of the spine and a partial missing disc in my back. The consultant told me to take up gardening – he told me