TUNING INTO GARDENING THROUGH HOME VIDEO
Baseball aside, the first sure sign of spring may be an uncontrollable urge to start gardening. But if you and trowels haven’t mixed lately, you might want to first park yourself in front of a TV set and a VCR. Home video can turn you into a jardinier extraordinaire.
Start with “Professor Greenthumb’s Guide to Good Gardening” (Karl-Lorimar, $14.95). Don’t let the too-precious title turn you off. Short of Thalassa Cruso or the late James Crockett--neither of whose fine PBS series have yet found their way to home video--John Lenanton, a.k.a. “Prof. Greenthumb” is the best one-stop video garden primer around.
British horticulturalist Lenanton offers articulate, straightforward, easy-to-follow advice and gardening tips. The 60-minute crash course in basic gardening should enable novices to deal with everything from seeds to seedlings--while also teaching experienced gardeners a thing or two about soil preparation and conditioning, fertilization, watering, pruning, cultivation and pest and disease control.
Two other series--Morris Video’s “Garden and Lawn” series with Ed Hume ($19.95 apiece) and Kartes Video’s “Yardening” series ($19.95 each) with Jeff Ball--offer expanded versions of each topic Prof. Greenthumb covers, and then some.
The entire “Yardening” series is time-indexed for easy access to topics--a real plus. With Ball’s authoritative advice, you should be able to grow strong, disease-resistant plants. He emphasizes proper management and cultivation techniques, avoiding the use of insecticides. There are six new “Yardening” tapes this season (and 12 altogether).
A good starting place in the series is “How to Design a Flower Garden,” a 48-minute, nine-segment program. Ball demonstrates site selection, garden types, design principles, flower and foliage selection, soil preparation, irrigation, mulching, compost-making and basic maintenance. While this and other tapes in the series are geared for a national audience, California viewers should have no trouble weeding out Eastern-oriented advice and honing in on applicable techniques.
“How to Grow Roses,” a 48-minute “Yardening” excursion through the process of growing the world’s favorite flower, begins where it should--with soil testing and site selection. Ball then details how to transplant bare-root and container roses, how to mulch and irrigate roses and how and what to feed them.
“How to Care for Your Lawn” is the hard-work tape of the bunch, 53 minutes detailing how to renovate or start from scratch, how to seed, sod, mow, feed and--of prime importance--how to water. Anyone who’s ever struggled to achieve that elusive “manicured” look will find this tape beneficial.
“How to Grow Plants in Sunspaces” and “How to Grow Plants in a Greenhouse” tread into the most esoteric territory. They may be most pertinent to Eastern gardeners wanting to extend the growing season. But if you’re interested in exotics or in controlled climates, either tape may be worth your investment--there’s much overlap.
Though a newer tape, “How to Grow Cool-Weather Vegetables” might seem off-season just now, Ball’s earlier “How to Grow Warm-Weather Vegetables” is appropriate to spring and summer planting. The basic program of instruction is the same in each and covers much of the same material found in “Flower Garden” and “Roses.” In the “Vegetables” tapes, however, Ball demonstrates how to select crops, how to raise seedlings and how to harvest the bounty. Many good tips are crammed into these 57-minute tapes, helpful even to the experienced gardener.
Ed Hume’s “Garden and Lawn” multipart series never comes up to the level of “Greenthumb’s” or Ball’s. While none of the three series offer much in the way of production values, Hume keeps up such a monotone that you may have to jolt yourself awake. He may well be the Will Rogers of plants: It seems Hume’s never met one he doesn’t like. We’re shown so many “beautiful” flowers and plants that we begin to wonder how all can live up to that billing.
The best volume in his series is “Garden Pruning.” Here, Hume actually gets down to business with shears and lops off branches all over the place. One big problem: this 47-minute excursion, like all the others in the series, is never broken down into chapters. (Why didn’t he use the entire back cover? It’s a cache of white space.)
Hume’s virtually identical vegetable tapes--”Blue Ribbon Veggies” and “Grow Your Own Vegetables”--are not as illuminating as Ball’s. For my taste, Hume reaches for insecticidal controls far too readily; Ball’s emphasis on basic preventive garden medicine is safer.
“Spectacular Roses” is basically a 56-minute tour through a public rose garden. Lovely as it is, and nice as it is to see the variety available, there’s no plus for the gardener who’s trying to figure out how roses work in the home garden. “Success With Indoor Plants” and “Design With Plants” are also virtually identical--57 minutes of rather tedious techniques in indoor plant care. “Annuals/Hanging Baskets,” like “Roses,” becomes a “can you name this plant?” tour through a grower’s offerings. There’s little attempt at organizing.
“Custom Landscaping” covers some of the same territory as “Design,” with bits and pieces of all of the above thrown into the mix. If you’ve never gardened before, you won’t find this of much use. “Exclusive Lawns” and “Ground Covers” wind up the series. At 48 minutes, “Lawns” might make you seek out ground covers as a viable alternative. Here, Hume offers some helpful tidbits, with close-up views of these myriad plants in their proper habitats.
Videos have their limitations, too. For printed illustrated instructions that you can actually take out into the garden, try HP’s superior paperback series covering much the same territory, or Sunset’s or Ortho. And hope that some smart soul at PBS realizes what a gold mine rests in the old James Crockett and Thalassa Cruso tapes.
Information: Karl-Lorimar (714) 474-0355, Morris (213) 379-2414, Kartes (800) 331-1387.
