The thrill of sitting in the big blue chair

It's not that I have been anywhere exotic and dangerous or taken part in gravity-defying sporting activities. I haven't deviated from my normal weekly working routine. I have executed all my daily chores as usual. All I have done is sit in a different chair.

I have been doing the Sunday gardening show on BBC Radio Cleveland for the past three-and-a-half years.

I started as a guest expert with Stewart MacFarlane, appearing in the last hour of his morning show. This gave me a good grounding in taking live questions over the phone and learning how to interact with both the public and the professional on air.

The show proved so popular that since March I have been co-presenting my own two-hour show from midday until two, still on a Sunday.

Being a 'gardener' and not a 'presenter', I have had to be 'driven', by my producer and co-presenter. That means that he presses all the buttons, slides the faders and twizzles the knobs, whilst I just sit and chat to the callers.

Up until this week that was. Yes, this week I got to sit on the other side of the desk. I was in the big blue chair, playing with all the controls.

It was scary, but it was fun. A massive step for me, but the odd thing is, nobody listening to the show will have noticed anything different (I hope).

The joy of presenting such a show is that I get to talk to loads of fellow gardeners, from the complete beginner right through to the professional and even now and again the famous.

We all have a common interest. What keeps us going is the pursuit of nurturing the perfect garden, stocked with the best plants, and then gradually changing everything as new trends, hybrids and products come onto the market.

What amazes me most of all is the amount of questions and gardening queries that people have. You would have thought that there were only a finite number of horticultural problems.

That is not nature's way though. Just when you thought you had it all figured out, she throws up something new to baffle you with.

I am not suggesting that I know it all, or that there is ever one answer to every problem. I was recently at a Gardeners' Question Time in Guisborough.

There were three panellists, all local gardening personalities. One was a television celebrity who specialised in fruit and vegetables, was mostly an organic gardener and was heavily into garden folklore.

The second person managed a large chain of garden centres, knew all the chemicals remedies for every disease, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants.

Then there was me. So between us, we could answer all the questions posed to us. We approached each problem from a slightly different angle, and with the odd exception, would come up with our own, equally valid, solution.

The result was an intelligent, informative and probing discussion about each problem.

For me, gardening questions keep me on my toes, give me a good excuse to buy and read all the gardening magazines, and supply the raison-d'tre for presenting a question-and-answer gardening show on local radio.

BOB from Bishop Auckland has a path that regularly gets weed infested. He is getting on now and finding kneeling much harder. He wants to know if it would be worth investing in a flame gun.

A flame gun is a long-handled blow torch that runs on gas or paraffin. You get to blast the weed into oblivion without bending or digging. It not only kills the weeds, but can 'cook' away latent seeds gathering in the cracks.

The only downside to these flaming wands is that they can set alight mulches, especially in the summer season. As you are wanting to use this on a pathway, you should get good results.

However, if you did want to clear a larger area or border, I have heard of people using steam wallpaper strippers with much more success. Might be worth a try.

POSTSCRIPT

Ask About Gardening is presented by Brigid Press and Tim Ellingford every Sunday between midday and 2pm, on 95FM BBC Radio Cleveland.

Published: 02/08/2003