Oh, I know the kind of post you’re wanting out of me. You want to know all about filming with the BBC, or maybe the eco-celeb gossip from the Soil Association Conference, including exactly what happened in those long, quiet hours after I drunkenly tweeted that I had brushed by hand along the back of Monty’s corduroy jacket…

But instead I’m going to talk to you about soil carbon sequestration. Oh no, there goes half of you. Ah well, at least those of you left have a genuine interest. No, don’t you go too! I’ll keep it short and make it Fun! And Accessible! Well, you know, maybe.

Just you and me then. I have – as I say – been to the Soil Association Conference. I am not trying to set myself up here as some kind of eco-queen. That I really am not, but I am, like many, on a bit of a mission to making my life more sustainable, and I do have a hunch that gardening has a big part to play in this. After picking up titbits from local talks and books, the full emersion of the conference was food for the soul, packed with radical people and challenging ideas about how we can save ourselves from hurtling towards Armageddon. But it’s really a farmers’ shindig, and so I spent much of my time trying to work out how I could apply the ideas I was hearing to gardening, not actually as hard as it sounds.

The talk of the conference, the buzz, if you will, was all of this soil carbon sequestration. It’s all pretty new. I may not have got the details down exactly, but the gist is this: soil, when full of organic matter or put down to permanent grassland, acts as a carbon sink, which gives extra grist to organic farming’s mill, hence the excitement. Now obviously they were talking about permanent grassland in terms of cows and grazing and – most especially – the role it can play in counterbalancing all the farting, but my mind immediately sprang to my lawn. Lawns do get a terrible rap environmentally-speaking , because they require constant petrol-based attention and regular applications of oil-based fertilisers, and they often get called names such as ‘green desert’. I know all this, as well as the fact that they are just a weird historical hangover, but I have a soft spot. I have always loved lawns and sensed they must be better than, say, a sea of gravel, environmentally speaking. Turns out I was right. They make excellent carbon sinks.

Obviously the benefit of this is lost if you fire up the old petrol or electric mower every time it needs cut or if you liberally sprinkle on chemical fertilisers, which is why I was out yesterday having another go at evening out its bumps and troughs to make it fit for the push mower, and why I have just ordered some of this micro-clover mix, which will keep the grass green and fix nitrogen so that it feeds itself. Short of spontaneously shaping itself into a rough likeness of the messiah (or his mum), this must be the most my lawn can contribute towards saving the world.

By the way if you are mainly a veg gardener, the trick is to try not to dig– every time you cultivate all that carbon just gets released. As such, I availed myself of a copy of Charles Dowding’s Organic Gardening the Natural, No Dig Way, which looks – unsurprisingly – like being ahead of the curve.

Oh, you have stayed till the end! Have some gossip. Slebs I have met or spotted this week: Martyn Cox, Dawn Isaac, Alys Fowler, Charles Dowding, Rob Hopkins, Patrick Holden, Rebecca Hoskins, Monty Don and John Craven. BBC filming try-out? Painfully awful and OK in turns. At one point I attempted to play Cleve to Martyn Cox’s Joe (talkative and kept things going)and Alex Denman’s James (posh and enthusiastic), but sadly without being half as funny or smouldering as The Quiet One himself. And Monty? After the corduroy-brushing incident he whisked me off to his Land Rover and plied me with organically raised pork products and vintage perry. I eventually lulled him to sleep by humming Fields of Gold (dont click! it will really play!) into his ear then made good my escape by hurling some battery eggs into his path.

In the old days of local radio, we remember unfortunately common slips of the tongue from DJs that led to some entertaining moments. The DJ equivalent of Colemanballs, for those Private Eye readers out there.

Nowadays, standards of presenting on local radio have, generally, gone up. Sometimes, the programmes can actually be listened to without squirming. Radio presenters such as Ali Booker on Jack FM in Oxford are warm and a delight to listen to; even BBC Oxford is OK now that Anne Diamond has left.

But one BBC Oxford presenter, Joel Hammer, can still provide a link to the DJing of the past, bless him. We have mentioned Joel before on this site (read the post here), and as we’ve listened to him on more than one occasion, he can’t be that bad.

Mind you, we often end up listening to BBC Oxford when we’re travelling somewhere, because a) it’s the only local station we can access in the car, and b) we don’t seem to meet the demographic for many of the national stations (sob).

This morning, though, Joel Hammer did do a lovely slip of the tongue. He was introducing the gardening slot on his Sunday Lunch programme, and encouraging listeners to ring in with their gardening accomplishments of 2009, and what they felt went wrong in their gardens this year.

(Bear with us. We know it’s hard to make gardening sound interesting… unless you’re a gardener. Our gardening accomplishment of the year was getting rid of the 200 tonnes of gravel that the previous owners thought nice, and replacing it with a grass. But we even left that to a professional – we don’t get our hands dirty if we can help it.)

Anyhoo, Joel then stated that his gardening experts might be able to help if people had had problems with their gardens. So call in, he said chirpily,

“and our experts will club their heads together.”

Cue vision of Monty Don, Joe Swift, and the nation’s best-loved media-luvvie-gardeners standing in an allotment, head-butting each other.

No, I’m not joking. We used to grow bananas, in our Brisbane garden, and had a fair bit of success. Those plants were about 4m high though – and the climate was sub-tropical!

Imagine my surprise then when I saw that one of Monty Don’s favourite fruits to grow is a banana! Admittedly a dwarf banana, but even so – growing bananas in Britain! I had expected those to be one of the items that would become unavailable, or an expensive luxury, in a post-peak-oil world but it turns out we might be able to grow them in a conservatory or greenhouse in our back garden. The variety Monty recommended was a Dwarf Cavendish, which gets to 6-7ft before fruiting, with leaves 2ft long and 6″ wide. It’s a lot smaller than our Lady Finger bananas in Brisbane, but still pretty big for a greenhouse or polytunnel. 

There is an even smaller version avalable though – the Musa Cavendish Super Dwarf Banana. These fruit when they are only 4ft tall – and look like a much better candidate for a greenhouse or polytunnel, as long as you can keep them above 3°c. Might make it onto my planting list if I have the space!

Suppliers

• Hardy Tropicals – for the Musa Cavendish Super Dwarf Banana
• The Plant Directory - for the Dwarf Cavendish from £15
• Carreglefn Nurseries – Dwarf Cavendish Bananas from £10

What is it with Gardener’s World presenters and excruciating conversation? I thought we’d reached the nadir in the corduroy era when Monty would treat Carol Klein like an embarrassing old aunt with dementia who’d just wandered out of the shrubbery and she’d be all but making the sign of the cross behind his back when he loped off to the Long Border.

But early signs are that the Buckland era will bring its own range of conversational horrors. ‘Do you want a hand with that nail, Alys’ he jokes as they companiably build a compost bin. She makes some unidentifiable facial grimace in return. It’s meant to look like she’s humourously irritated with him, but it just looks like she hates him. ‘Lovely to see you Carol.’ ‘Lovely to see you too,’ she replies through teeth so gritted the grass is covered with powdered enamel. It’s like being stuck in a drinks party in which someone has just run off with someone else’s wife but they’re all still passing round the G and Ts.

It’s not that I really think they hate each other. It’s just that they’re not trained actors and can’t summon up ‘natural’ banter with people they don’t know very well while standing in a featureless field surrounded by JCBs. If they were trained actors, Carol’s voice wouldn’t break when she got excited (ie when she saw a plant) and Alys wouldn’t get so shrill only dogs can hear her. It kind of makes them more likeable really. Still don’t get  Joe ‘apples and pears, me old missus’ Swift though – where did he get that accent from? Isn’t his father in Keeping up Appearances and his mother Margaret Drabble? 

Also I know it’s very brave new world, new start to feature a new garden and build it from scratch and all that, but I’ve always wondered why Gardener’s World can’t just be set in a normal garden with overgrown clematises and dandelions in the lawn and greenhouses that have rotting frames and big scary unidentifiable bushes that you can’t kill. Then I’d really learn something. Instead I learnt that you have to have a bespoke shed made by trained craftsmen (with a specially angled roof, naturally) and that you have to build your own compost bins with offcuts of something with special grooves for the sliding oh whatever the hell it was. Not all gardeners like wandering around with a power drill, you know, some of us would rather click Buy Now and wait in for the nice man from Parcelforce.

I missed the opening Gardener’s World last night. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I did turn over briefly to see Alys Fowler and Toby Buckland scintillatingly lifting a window frame up to a shed wall before D said ‘Can’t we watch some real telly? Like The Wire? [though as anyone knows, this isn't strictly real telly because we can only understand one in 20 of the words– or one in four if we put the subtitles on]‘ But I shall revisit Gardener’s World at my leisure thanks to the wonderful people of Sky series link.

If for nothing else, I must keep up with what Alys is wearing – I think she’s pioneered a new genre of gardener’s clothing – not so much charity shop chic as clothes worn by the old lady who works in the charity shop chic. The blouses. The cardigans. It kind of works. And it’s high time there was a new look for lady gardeners. The Vita thing has gone on way long enough. I’ve been pioneering the baby porridge on pyjama Croc combo look for some time, though strangely it hasn’t yet caught on outside my house.

Actually, I’m rather delighted that Alys Fowler is finally being allowed to speak on Gardener’s World. There was a long period during the Monty era when she would just lurk around in the background, wearing a strange blouse and planting a tree. 

Out killing slugs this morning I realised that I can’t see one of the little charmers without being mentally transported to a cinema in the mid 1980s stealthily making my way through a jumbo bag of Rowntrees Fruit Gums without spoiling Short Circuit for everyone else. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t see it too…

garden slugs

fruit gum

Here. Read the thing in full, you need to follow the argument and I have work to do!

David Davis

I’ve commented about this poor, sad, unhistorically-educated Monty Don chappie on The Landed Underclass, earlier, but Bella Gerens does a better academic demolition job on him and his hypotheses.

Yes it’s nice to play at growing a few veg – even keeping a few chickens, if you can stand the slimy shit, are prepared to shoot, gas or snare the inevitable foxes and hawks (beware of the RSPB Gestapo*** on that one!) and stuff their corpses in your wheelie-bin, and if you can bear, as a metropolitan dweller, to kill, pluck, draw and then cook and eat the poor bastards when the time comes.

I don’t object to play-growing. But it won’t feed a nation of 60 million, no way Monty. You can afford to, but we can’t.

***Hawks are of course quite OK, and ought to be allowed to predate your stuff all they want, but your food-birds are of no interest ot them whatsoever.

Salma Yaqoob on BBC Question Time

Respect leader and Birmingham City councillor Salma Yaqoob featured on this week’s Question Time panel, joining presenter David Dimbleby and alongside Labour MP Liam Byrne, Conservative MP Justine Greening, former Sun editor and columnist Kelvin MacKenzie and television gardener and writer Monty Don.

Salma spoke on a number of issues including Dutch MP Geert Wilders, the economy and banking,  child truancy, climate change and the drug reclassification policy.

Salma Yaqoob on BBC Question Time

On yesterday’s UK entry ban of controversial Dutch MP Geert Wilders, she said:

“Personally, I am uncomfortable with censorship.  Does Mr Wilders have the right to provoke or even be offensive?  Yes, he does under freedom of speech, and if he’s being barred from the country simply because he offends people’s religious sensibilities then no matter how personally distasteful I might find his views, I wouldn’t support a ban.

“However, society does have a right and indeed a duty to protect itself from people who incite hatred and incite violence and if he was deemed to be in breach of our laws in this regard then, in that context, a ban would be justifiable.”

“Although I find his [Wilder's] indignation about being banned and calling for the upholding of the freedom of speech abit hypocritical considering he advocates banning the Qur’an,” she added.

Salma Yaqoob challenges Kelvin MacKenzie on Question Time

She also spoke on the state of our economy and finances and whether certain employees of banks, that were saved using public money, deseved bonuses.  She challenged Sun columnist Kelvin MacKenzie, who claimed such bank employees were ‘talented people’ who couldn’t be stopped.

“Talented people?  They have wrecked our economy! It’s absolutely shameless and digusting,” she responded.

“These are people who’ve wrecked our economy and I don’t believe a word of this ‘contract’ argument. These people would not have a job now were it not for the British tax payers bailing out the banks. They’re lucky they’re on a salary, never mind the cheek to ask for a bonus in these circumstances.

“It’s also politicians who should be in the dock because it was their decision to take away the safety mechanism, to introduce de-regulation which allowed the unvetted greed. It allowed the bankers to make the risky decisions without any proper scrutiny. It freed them up to reward themselves with these incredible bonuses and at the same time politicians from the Conservative party as well as the Labour party championed this neo-liberal economic orthodoxy which has brought us this disaster,” explained Salma.

Salma Yaqoob on BBC Question Time

“I think it’s really disgusting that we have now a public culture where if you commit huge crimes, which are resulting in millions of ordinary people losing their jobs and their homes, you only have to come up with a half-hearted apology, no accoutability, no sanctions, no punishments – and if you’re a politician you can lead our country into war on a lie and not have to resign – there is something really deeply wrong with a democratic system we have where instead of people being made an example of, we now have the lesson that ‘you can do this in the future, you can be this reckless because there’ll be no deterrent’,” she concluded.

Watch the complete programme on BBC iPlayer via the links below (UK only).

BBC Question Time – (12th February 2009)

BBC Question Time Extra [BBC News 24] – (12th February 2009)

An edited 30-minute verson of Thursday’s Question Time will be shown on Saturday 14th February 2009, at 8.30pm on BBC News 24.

Website link and presenter biogs here.

Salma Yaqoob appears on BBC Question Time tonight

Birmingham Respect councillor Salma Yaqoob will again appear on BBC political panel show Question Time tonight, alongside fellow politicians and analysts answering questions and concerns from the British public.

The leader of the Respect Party and Chair of the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition will be joining presenter David Dimbleby and airing her views alongside Birmingham Hodge Hill Labour MP Liam Byrne – who failed to speak out against the recent attacks in Gaza, Conservative MP Justine Greening, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, and television gardener and writer Monty Don.

The show will be broadcast from Bath at 10.35pm on Thursday, 12thFebruary 2009 on BBC 1.

BBC link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/7878952.stm

Salma Yaqoob will feature on The Politics Show on Sunday

Salma Yaqoob will also appear on the West Midlands edition of BBC current affairs programme the Politics Show, which will be broadcast at 12.30pm on Sunday 15th February 2009, following the main national show at midday.

BBC Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/regions/west_midlands/default.stm

Images: BBC

Monday morning was really, really busy here in the office as we one of our favourite and best selling products was given a special feature by Monty Don in the weekend supplement of The Mail.

Those of you who have already purchased one of our FSC Wooden Compost Bins will know how fabulous they are but to see this appear in the press was wonderful. The mention we received was “Spacious with solid wood sides that retain most of the heat during the composting process. Easy to assemble and, all in all, a top class bin.” What more could we ask for?

So to celebrate this appearing, the team here at The Recycle Works decided that for a LIMITED PERIOD ONLY, we would offer 10% discount on our FSC wooden range of products – therefore, all our compost bins and raised beds are for sale with this 10% discount. Also, don’t forget that all orders over £15 come with FREE Mainland UK Delivery.

Love Your Environment!

Monty Don is a very British sounding person when he speaks. He recently suffered a stroke and has over a period of time suffered with depression. Read this for a little insight into this warm person…. Here is a quote found at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/specials/times_appeal/article5385664.ece :-

A few years ago I started a scheme with a group of local drug addicts, growing vegetables and raising sheep and pigs. The idea behind it – other than seeing no reason why they could not enjoy exactly the same aspects of growing things that I and so many others do – was to try to connect those that felt most adrift from society and whom society most wished to disown with a real sense of place. If you get to know your piece of ground it becomes personal and with that is a sense of responsibility and nurture. You give something of yourself to it and it gives back. Sounds a bit whacky but it works. Anyway, the group got involved and many made real progress – certainly much better than locking them up and much cheaper, too. It has not been easy but is still going and I would love to see more small groups like it all over the country.

Monty Don, gardener, journalist, author, ex-presenter of Gardener’s World and now President of the Soil Association is a convert to the Peak Oil cause and the Transition Movement.

Last November he wrote a great article for Gardener’s World magazine – you can find a copy over on Transition Culture - in it he talks about the invisible footprint we leave as gardeners, and stresses that we need to move to a much more local society.

This August, just as he starts his new post at the Soil Association, he gave a wonderful interview to The Guardian. In it he discusses creating an underground movement to spread the message that we need to be growing much more of our own food. He also wants to move the Soil Association into a more central role in ensuring the sustainability of Britain’s food supply.

I would much rather someone bought food that was local and sustainable but not organic than bought organic food that had to be shipped across the world. We’ve got to move away from making people feel lesser because they’re not [eating] organic. There is no doubt about it, ’sustainable’ is a better expression for the same sorts of ideas than ‘organic’.

You can see this emphasis through the work the Soil Association is doing now – their latest taste of the good life courses talk about helping to “create a vibrant relocalised food culture” and leading ”a planet friendly lifestyle”.

Monty will be one to watch – let’s hope he manages to get his guerilla gardening movement going – we’ll all be better prepared if he does.

The long awaited news of the next national Head Gardener has recently been announced – he will be 38 year old nurseryman and landscape gardener Toby Buckland, dubbed an ‘ethical gardener’ and ‘hugely likable and enthusiastic’ – Monty’s wellies are a big thing to step into, so I wish him well.

Toby won a gold for his garden made from recycled materials at Gardeners’ World Live this year, so I am pleased to see the Geoff Hamilton tradition continuing in organic gardening making the most of what is to hand – its certainly the way we do things around here – very little gets wasted and what does go goes to Freecycle!

I am a tad disappointed not to see a woman at the GW helm – as it was certainly time, and there are lots of us about, lets face it. Alys would have done a grand job, I’m sure.

Some programmes are a joy to watch, some are a joy to make. Around the World in 80 Gardens was definitely the latter, according to series producer Kerry Richardson. And hopefully the former, too, she told Midlands Centre members and guests.

Monty Don on the Oriental Express from Bangkok to Singapore

Richardson explained that the series of 10 x 60 mins programmes was intended to be much more than a gardening series, and a way of understanding the cultures of the selected countries and gardens. Written and presented by gardening expert Monty Don, the series was shown on BBC2 in the spring of 2008.

With the aid of numerous excerpts, Richardson explained in detail both the advantages and technical demands of shooting in HD.

Monty Don at Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny

Monty Don in the Drakensburg, Durban

By Dorothy Hobson, May 2008

Click here to see the Birmingham Post coverage.

I love this article on the BBC website proclaiming the joys of pottering.

What does postmodern pottering look like?

What might it look like for workaholics?

Maybe there is a course to be written on the joys of pottering….

I am SO with my garden right now, as months of planning and loving tending are coming to manifestation. Things are coming up everywhere, the peas are flowering, the potatoes are burgeoning, the salads being picked, tomatoes potted on, courgettes and runner beans planted out, broad beans making pods and apples fruiting. Whilst I am still taking maximum organic preventative measures in the form of slug pubs, bird decoys and soap sprays, I am now resolved to the fact that the Earth, in the form of slugs, snails, birds and insects, will take something back. In the end it will be me!!

On matters of mortality, I am still gutted about Monty Don leaving Gardeners World, and have noticed that the BBC blog records similar dismay at Monty’s departure and concern for his health. I just read Alys Fowler’s (Berryfields’ Head Gardener) blog, and it moved me to tears. Just the words “Monty has gone. The swallows have moved into the tool shed’ were enough. ‘The Mighty ‘D” is such a touching and poignant posting.

Like a lot of Gardeners World fans, I think its time for a woman as national Head Gardener. No-one mentions Alys (though Carol gets a lot of votes), but it struck me that she is perfect for the job. She has Monty’s gentle affability, youth, pleasant good looks, is very well qualified and has a quirky little dog to entertain and beguile. I agree that Chris Beardshaw is also very easy on the eye, but I do think that the time is right for us gardening girls to strike out. So Alys – go girl!

First we heard that Monty is taking a few weeks out from presenting BBC2’s ‘Gardeners World’ and then we hear that Monty has had a minor stroke and is stepping down from his role as lead presenter.

A statement from Monty Don himself shows the attitude which as placed him number 1 on our list of ‘celebrity gardeners’. Monty Don is a fighter. We admire how he has taken the decision to concentrate on his recovery. He will surely succeed.

“I am proud to have led GW for the past five years and have enjoyed every minute of sharing my passion with the programme’s viewers.

I intend to take some gardening leave for the rest of the summer to make a full recovery and so that I am ready to tackle new projects.”

Of course we wish him well and if you want to send him your best wishes you can email them to gwletters@bbc.co.uk. The Gardeners world site says that they will ensure that your messages are passed on to Monty.

So Gardeners World will be headed by another – i cant imagine who can fill Monty’s shoes. I find myself wandering out the room or flicking the remote when any of the other presenters come on.

Gardeners World has a tradition of having down to earth gardeners presenters – Jeff and Percy looked like they could handle a spade and did so regularly. I hope the new lead presenter is as passionate and as practically minded as the others.

We’ll check our diaries, we might have a slot on a Friday night at 8!

Best of luck to Monty

Well – it seems that my ‘missing Monty Don’ postings were a bit prophetic. Its just been announced that he has suffered from a stroke and will be stepping down from the Gardener’s World Head Gardener job with the BBC. His shoes will be extremely difficult to fill, but I really wish him well for a very speedy recovery. What more can we say but get well soon, Monty.

Okay, now that I am on this ‘descriptive writing about Monty Don’ trip, I am finding all sorts of waxing lyricals about him. He really captures the imagination, doesn’t he – that’s because there is something of the Earth about him. After I posted last night’s whimsy, Carol announced that Monty is having a break – hope he is okay, bless him. I will look forward to seeing him back on our screens soon!

Here’s an extract from an interview he did with Jane Wheatley in the Times, who has also cottoned on to that Hardy connection – we English love our Wessexness:

The tall, burly man kneeling in a potato patch rubbing friable soil through his fingers as if he were making pastry is terribly good-looking in a Lawrentian sort of way — or Thomas Hardyish, possibly; anyway you wouldn’t shoo him out of your kitchen garden if you came across him there. “You want to earth up your spuds,” he says to the camera hovering over his head on the end of a long jib. “Keep them protected till frosts are over.” He has curly hair, sleepy eyes and dirt under his fingernails; his dandyish costume ­ corduroy trousers, button braces, leather jerkin — has just a sufficient patina of use about it to escape parody. This, we think, is evolved nurturing man, anchored to the land, taking the long view while the rest of us are tossed around like jetsam.

I love the bit about being anchored in the land – that is such a good, good thought, and reminds me how important groundedness is – we need groundedness when we all at sea with the world. Thank goodness for Monty…

You’ve got to take your hat off to AA Gill, the Times’ TV critic. Whilst he may have been rather unforgivably panning Monty Don’s Around the World in 80 Gardens, the way he describes Monty is a hoot. It really is such a classic that I have to include it here, where mostly I usually only record my own whimsy… (and I thought I was guilty of purple passages!)

Monty is the reincarnation of Hardy’s Gabriel Oak (if fictional characters can be reincarnated). Whereas Alan Titch-marsh, for all his rambling, is still the evocation of suburban patios, Monty is redolent of a wilder, more ancient throb. He has an ancient boskiness, a Celtic spirit – the green man. He comes from a preindustrial land of peasantry, a place of half-remembered folk song and Catweazle. I’m awestruck by his wild, set-aside, organic beauty, that perfect unkempt meadow of hair, the charmingly lopsided five-bar mouth and all the Bodenish foliage of corduroy and faded cotton, the solid daisy roots and manly man bag. He is retro, eco, postmodern: a difficult look to pull off, but Monty does so with gusto. He is the mulchy, double-dug fantasy of a great many of the female audience, who dream of being espaliered up against a warm garden wall.

Well… he may have a certain point, but what tosh!

But where is Monty? He has disappeared from Gardener’s World and good old Carol Klein is taking about him as though he has passed on to garden nirvana. It’s ‘Monty always intended’ and ‘Monty wanted us to have a go” etc. GW just isn’t the same without him, and its time he got back, wherever he is!

Watching Gardener’s World last night, I was struck yet again by a troubling thing. I’m sure there are plenty of women out there in the home counties who secretly warm at the thought of an antique-style leather jerkin, but I can’t see Monty Don on Gardener’s World without thinking of Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. I don’t know if it’s the crinkly forehead, something about the ears. or his unique yen for retro-chic peasant clothing. And then there’s the title sequence, in which he hurdles hedges in a single stride while shouldering an enormous spade. He may be popping over to the Long Border, but he has the air of a man about to fell forests with a single blow. Either they’ve shot him from a funny angle or the man has 12 foot legs. Or, and this shouldn’t be totally discounted, everyone else who presents Gardener’s World is really really tiny. 

I so love Gardeners World – when it’s not on I long for it, and when it is I eschew any social activity going to settle myself down in front of it on a Friday evening. It has an odd effect – something between an adrenaline rush and a mug of hot chocolate – but gives me such a warm feel-good factor that gets my weekend in the garden off to a fantastic start. So I was thrilled to see that, last night, I got a whole hour of the exquisite pleasure.

I really enjoyed Joe’s allotment piece – being an avid veggie gardener it was fascinating viewing. It did make me glad though that I have my very own kitchen garden paradise at home and don’t have to set off somewhere else for the weekend. It was very funny to watch the reactions of the allotment stalwarts to Joe’s ‘Chelsea Flower Show’ raised bed arrangement – you know, Joe, they do have a point – Geoff Hamilton of blessed memory didn’t make them rectangular and 4 feet wide for nothing!

At 8.30, I thought, great, now I have 30 minutes of Monty and Alys at Berryfields with a bit of magazine style cutting to various short clips of interest. But alas – what is going on, BBC???! Granted, we get an interesting and engaging, but largely repeated 25 minutes of Carol Kline on propagation and green gardening. Don’t get me wrong, I think that CAT at Machynlleth is fab, and always welcome the ‘green’ view – but we only got a cursory glance at what is going on at Berryfields, and that is my favourite bit!!

Monty promises to be back next week, but BBC – you had better hold him to it!!

When most of us are off looking for chocolate eggs in the garden, Linden was off picking up MONTY, an 8-10 year old Deerhound x Greyhound(?) with bad arthritis and poor mobility.

MONTY was picked up near Frome, presumably dumped by his owners as no-one has claimed him. After a night in the Police station, a few days in temporary foster and a night at our kennels, MONTY is now residing as a long-term and potentially permanent foster with me (Elkie) and my gang.

MONTY has been with us for a week now and has really settled. He’s a big cuddly bear who everyone loves, dogs and people alike. His mobility is improving and he is quickly getting used to family life, even our family lie-ins