Jump on Spring today

Good morning - and what a great day today!! Hmm - it promises to be... so far just dark and cold. BUT we are heading to Toronto for the Jump on Spring programme at the Toronto Botanical Gardens after our "Staff meeting" in the hot tub in a few moments, and after we blow out the driveway. Since I wanted to show off BRUNNERA GOLD STRIKE at the Stratford Garden Festival March 1-4, I brought it inside a few weeks ago. Well, it is blooming to beat the band right now. Our house is heated hydronically, and we neglected to put a cold area in, so it is leaping ahead perhaps a bit more than ideal for a show still 10 days from now. (I am SO thrilled - my sister is coming to visit from B.C. - so that week is going to be a very busy one - as well, I am doing a talk at our local (Maryborough) hort society that week - a dry run for the Canada Blooms talk - "Low Maintenance Gardening by a High Maintenance Woman". ) that was too much a run-on sentence.
However - as I am on a soapbox, I will add one more rant that a friend of mine sent me - and surely we can all sympathize. It follows" Well it has seriously started, Cabin Fever.
I got a call last week from someone in my garden club and she was just ranting. Why aren't there any garden shows. Why don't any of these station have gardening.... where is it...
Well in the back of my head I recognized it. Cabin Fever or lack of being in the garden. Understanding Cabin Fever and often having to restrain myself from trying to take my early morning walk with coffee in hand in the yard....because there is two feet of snow still there, I sympathized with her. I too had in previous years noted how networks have a cycle of show programming. And the fall/winter cycle is home renovations...Gardening coming in the spring and summer. What was apparent to me was that the networks simply do not have Gardeners on the programming boards. Yes there are one or two here and there but likely less that 1/2 % of all current viewing.
So being the good little action oriented person I was I sent a message to HGTV about these. Very specifically I noted to them that Gardeners as much as we like to see the garden shows in spring and summer, we are in the yard in the spring and summer. When we need garden shows is: NOW!! The underlined section below is the response I received.
""As you can imagine, planning and implementing a schedule that will please everyone is a very challenging task and one that is taken very serious here at HGTV. In order to facilitate this process, ratings and viewer feedback are what is used to make decisions when it comes to programming. These two criteria have indicated that viewers are tuning into home-improvement and home décor programming – which is why we are showing more of those kinds of programs. (the fact that these are the only showing at this time of year might be the reason for that also.)
Gardening show requests too are taken into consideration and as a result you will be pleased to know that this spring HGTV will be airing three new gardening or gardening-related programs: Digging Deep, Green Force, and Urban Outsiders and new episodes of the Canadian original series, Take It Outside, as well as encore presentations of Outer Spaces. Our spring schedule starts the first week of April. Please check our website, hgtv.ca, for additional programming information.""
Nice to know and Yippee for new shows, but I have seen Take it Outside and it is a strange show about building decks and living space outside not gardening.
So it appears that they need viewer demand to have more gardening shows. I would invite you and as many people as you can share this message with, to ask for more garden programming.
This is the HGTV contact site, but don't stop there. Go to the website of any station or network you watch and put the demand in. Gardeners need (note need, not just want) Gardening shows NOW, just looking at garden catalogues is not enough!!.. More Canadian based Garden Shows!!
http://www.hgtv.ca/hgtv/faq.aspx#contactus
Now I am going to go look at some of my old vhs tapes of last summer's garden shows."

SO - the coffee pot says it wants to go outside. See you tomorrow... :)
Have a safe and joy-filled day.
Betty