Jenny Mollinson: ‘It has the feel of having some friends at hand with sound horticultural knowledge and experience’

By Jenny Mollison
Published on 28/10/2012 16:32

I was distressed to hear that Radio Scotland’s Beechgrove Potting Shed is being axed at the end of the year. I was brought up on radio programmes and still prefer radio to television. I can listen about the house and have a trusty portable in my greenhouse.

It seems remarkable that the curtain should come down on a programme with nearly a million weekly listeners.

Gardening is one of our most popular hobbies, judging from long waiting lists for allotments and I cannot foresee any change to this.

School and community gardens enhance neighbourhoods, diets improve with eating fresh food, and local biodiversity increases. It’s also a multi-million pound industry.

Novice gardeners joining an established allotment site can get advice from existing plotholders. They can watch what other gardeners are doing. But those options don’t exist with a new allotment site where the majority are beginners. Being able to phone the Potting Shed can be very useful for them. I hope BBC Scotland will reconsider their decision.

I’ve just dug up a row of raspberry canes which hadn’t fruited well for several years and was wondering whether it would be wise to replant now or later. Tuning in to the Potting Shed, I was delighted to find Carole Baxter explaining the pros and cons of autumn or spring planting of raspberries together with some handy tips I hadn’t thought of.

For me, the programme’s strength lies in its spontaneity. Sometimes the presenters have a bit of a banter between themselves before making their recommendations. They can ask the questioner for more details. It has the feel of having some friends at hand with sound horticultural knowledge and experience. I’ve known Jim McColl for a while now. Where he differs from many media gardeners is that he is first and foremost a professional gardener with 
an engaging manner who has made a success of radio and television rather than the reverse.

The Beechgrove Garden is broadcast from Aberdeen and the Potting Shed team are familiar with our climate. Other gardening programmes come from the south of England and while they may be entertaining and sometimes relevant, our Scottish weather is usually colder, wetter, and windier than the south. We need local solutions for our local situation. It’s not helpful to be encouraged to plant seeds for example when we can still see frost on the ground.