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Gardener's World and the average gardener
Busy-Lizzie
Posts: 24,025
in Talkback
Sorry, advance warning, bit of a rant coming up, but I don't often rant.
Last night on GW on TV Monty said that one indispensable piece of kit he has is his warm bed with heated cables in it. He said it cost £700 years ago and has saved him 10s of thousands of £s. Then he said if you can't afford that he had something cheaper, a big heated pad to put under seed trays. That cost £100. I don't see the average gardener affording that sort of thing, you need a huge GH to put it all in for a start. I think GW should be more for the average gardener.
Or are we all interested to see that anyway? How I miss Geoff Hamilton and all the things he showed us how to make cheaply.
Dordogne and Norfolk. Clay in Dordogne, sandy in Norfolk.
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Monty has things on the scale he does because gardening is his job and presumably it's worthwhile financially.
It's pretty obvious from looking at any gardening magazine or the shelves of the garden centre that smaller/cheaper versions are available.
Monty was honest, showing us what he uses and explaining how it helps. Those of us with the knowledge and skills can work out how to make our own - I've a feeling that current Health & Safety would do more than raise an eyebrow at a tv programme that suggested that the ordinary gardener should attempt to do that. Things were different in Geoff Hamilton's day.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Then he could have shown us cheaper methods without mentioning names.
I've made a warm propagator using my old dog's (who died) plastic basket filled with sand with a heating cable in it - bought cheaply on the internet.
You can't compare Masterchef, that is a competiton, GW isn't. The equivalent would be one of the gardening shows, like Malvern or Tatton Park. Chelsea being like one of the professional chef competitions.
Delia Smith, certainly in her early shows, cooked in her own kitchen using fairly normal equipment.
Delia lives close to my old home and when I lived in that part of Suffolk we had mutual acquaintances - the purposoe-built kitchen in her tv series may have been on her property but it wasn't her family kitchen, and the induction hob she used was certainly not normal back then. She also had a large back-room staff of recipe developers etc, as part of the Sainsbury magazine published by the company owned by her husband and herself and edited by her husband.
Anyway, as Monty didn't say, heated propagators are available from most garden centres for ??24.99 - I checked when I visited this morning. I didn't spot any heat pads but they appear to be available on Ebay from ??10 upwards.
What Monty did explain was the benefit of using heat when propagating - the majority of viewers have access to magazines and the internet, or can ask at their GC - in 30 minutes he can't say everything. Perhaps if he had more time ................
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
How do you know which Alan is Alan BB?
In the sticks near Peterborough
I understand BB. It's obvious when you think about it
In the sticks near Peterborough