Firstly, an introduction...

Ok, how do people usually start these things? I've tried a little blogging on myspace but never really got that far so I suppose that introducing myself and what I'm doing will be as good a place as any.I'm a professional gardener specialising in garden maintenance (as opposed to design or landscaping). I have no qualifications in gardening, just enthusiasm and a love of plants - mainly herbaceous although I do include roses amongst my loves. I fell into gardening whilst being unceremonially dumped into near financial ruin as the result of a failed PhD at Manchester Poly. I work on four regular gardens (five if you include my own, as I tend to do more work in the garden than my wife); these are dotted around the Halifax & Huddersfield area of Yorkshire - right in the middle of the Pennines for those who don't know the area - which doesn't bring quite as many problems with the climate as you might initially expect.I have been working as a gardener for just over three years now, after spending about 2 years working in a local garden centre, eventually becoming plant buyer. I decided that the garden centre wasn't quite what I wanted and that I needed more freedom to work with planting and the continuity that comes with working with the same garden - seeing how things develop, how the garden looks in different seasons and overcoming the plethora of problems that intrinsically accompany any garden. Having done a wide variety of almost completely unrelated jobs over the space of ten years since leaving University - none of which lasted more than a year and a half - I am at my happiest out in the garden, even if it's not my own.Well, I suppose that's probably enough of an introduction to myself. If I do actually get round to updating this blog on any sort of regular basis (I'm making no promises here), you'll probably find out more about me and my gardens (that's assuming anyone's interested - I sometimes wonder why anyone would want to read my thoughts on anything...).

Hello Andrew and thank you for adding a blog post.

You might be surprised to know that people really are interested in what you do and where you do.

I have been blogging for nearly four years now and actuallt started by using a static website format which was hell.

I moved over to Blogger and then Typepad and have never looked back.

The main focus for me was my Perigord Vacance website which was designed to keep friends and family up to date with our move to France and detail our project of property renovation.

It soon became clear though that we were being followed by loads of people who picked up the story through web searches.

I think we have about 58,000 hits on the site although I do not write a lot to it any more.

I am a great believer that people who join forums (or networks as we have here) or visit blogs, do not always act consciously on any information that they read there and then.

Sometimes, an email will come in from someone who has read a post on my gardening blog - Landscape Juice - which I may have written eighteen months ago.

Something that is written here, especially if the blogger or forum member adds a lot of crucial search engine 'juice' such as place names or plant names to the text, may surface several weeks later when someone quite unrelated to the site and does not know of it's existence, quite literally stumbles on the information.

Many people join a network thinking that a great orange orb of special light will illuminate the sky and a great feeling of well being and emotion will guide them to some promised land only to find the opportunities that they were expecting to pile up do not happen.

The strange thing is, these opportunities come when they are least expected and by blogging about something that is of interest to you, will one day, prove to be of use to someone else.

I do hope you decide to blog again as I do all of the members here because I am genuinely interested in what you have to say.

You may wish to experiment with the power of the blog and add a title to a blog post that you can do a search on at a later date.

For example 'Specialist garden maintenance companies on the Isle of Skye'

If this was added as a title, we could have these search results coming high on the Google or MSN results within a day and prove to be a great conduit for any garden companies who operate from the Isle of Skye.

All the best and I look forward to reading more.

Phil

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Phil Voice May 26, 2008 at 11:09am

Hello Andrew and thank you for adding a blog post.

You might be surprised to know that people really are interested in what you do and where you do.

I have been blogging for nearly four years now and actuallt started by using a static website format which was hell.

I moved over to Blogger and then Typepad and have never looked back.

The main focus for me was my Perigord Vacance website which was designed to keep friends and family up to date with our move to France and detail our project of property renovation.

It soon became clear though that we were being followed by loads of people who picked up the story through web searches.

I think we have about 58,000 hits on the site although I do not write a lot to it any more.

I am a great believer that people who join forums (or networks as we have here) or visit blogs, do not always act consciously on any information that they read there and then.

Sometimes, an email will come in from someone who has read a post on my gardening blog - Landscape Juice - which I may have written eighteen months ago.

Something that is written here, especially if the blogger or forum member adds a lot of crucial search engine 'juice' such as place names or plant names to the text, may surface several weeks later when someone quite unrelated to the site and does not know of it's existence, quite literally stumbles on the information.

Many people join a network thinking that a great orange orb of special light will illuminate the sky and a great feeling of well being and emotion will guide them to some promised land only to find the opportunities that they were expecting to pile up do not happen.

The strange thing is, these opportunities come when they are least expected and by blogging about something that is of interest to you, will one day, prove to be of use to someone else.

I do hope you decide to blog again as I do all of the members here because I am genuinely interested in what you have to say.

You may wish to experiment with the power of the blog and add a title to a blog post that you can do a search on at a later date.

For example 'Specialist garden maintenance companies on the Isle of Skye'

If this was added as a title, we could have these search results coming high on the Google or MSN results within a day and prove to be a great conduit for any garden companies who operate from the Isle of Skye.

All the best and I look forward to reading more.

Phil
Andrew Fereday May 26, 2008 at 11:42am

Thanks for the comment Phil. I've already posted another blog, as much for my own reference as anything. If I get the time, I'd like to write about my experiences growing a garden accompanying a rented house. I suppose it's a question of time management...