A New Garden TV

A while ago, I asked my readers to think about what would make a good gardening tv show. And they responded with a bunch of well thought out comments and over 100 emails to me.

So I’ve been reading and thinking. The reading is the easy part, the dangerous part is when I get thinking.

And I think there’s no good tv programs freely available to all of us because it’s now pretty much impossible to produce and fund such programs. It just isn’t going to happen. The world has changed and the communication industry has changed along with it in the face of the Internet.

What you told me you wanted was – quite plainly put – what you wanted, where you wanted it and when you wanted it. 125 different answers that added up to give “me” what I want to watch that’s relevant to my garden and my garden ability in my neighborhood, and oh yeah, when I want to watch it.

You didn’t describe Network TV, you described the Internet. You described the distribution and content model we call the Net.

And the face of the Internet itself is changing. From a top down kind of programming to a bottom up programming. Youtube users upload 13 hours of video every minute of the day. We upload more watchable minutes than all the major television networks put together. And North American viewers watch 10 billion videos a month (and growing).

Some would say that much of that user-generated content isn’t worth watching. And they’re right. But have you watched much network TV lately and convinced yourself that it is all worth watching? It seems that most of you don’t want to watch the current offerings about gardening so…

So having sorted that out in my mind – I got to the dangerous part.

And that was to start thinking about how to set something like this up. How to push the boundaries of gardening television or videos into new territory. How to make use of the Net to give us all a shot of gardening information that we can’t get from the traditional tv media.

I decided I needed partners to work with.

To jointly put together good gardening information of all kinds. Not promotional videos touting products (ads) but rather good info on product-reviews, designs, real gardens, real plants. Turn what we do in print into video and share it.

I made this offer to the garden writers listserv and got absolutely no takers.

Not one writer wrote saying “here’s the subscription to my video channel – upload them to your site.” Nobody even wrote and said, “I’m going to make some”.

In confess I might have gone after the wrong group. It may be possible that the group of people we should be working with are the people who are already involved with the Net.

You folks.

Maybe it’s about sharing our own gardens. In simple ways. Maybe not in professional quality ways but in ways that show what we do and share those ideas and gardens with each other. Maybe it’s not about saying I don’t have a good enough garden to saying I don’t have a great garden but it’s *mine* and I’m sharing it. (I note that none of our gardens are ever good enough) So I’m going to hunt up some digital images and show you the changes in my own garden over the past year.

Software exists now (very simple software) that allows you to take a bunch of digital images, add a bit of sound or voice and make a very fast video. Easily done.

I’ve set up a preliminary video channel at http://video.douggreeensgarden.com and would be delighted to upload any garden video produced by one of my readers.

Go out – take a bunch of digital images of your fall garden or string some shots of your garden through this past summer together – make a video about your garden. Upload it to Youtube and let me know the address where I can find it. Keep it between 2-3 minutes long.

Maybe it’s not about finding professional partners. Maybe it’s about finding folks who will share their gardens with us using a video. Maybe it’s about finding folks who take a lot of pictures of a garden on their holidays and share it with us. Maybe it’s about you doing this.

I think it is probably about us doing our own garden TV? I think it’s about finding a merry band of garden videographers to do this with me.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll take it beyond just a a mere subdomain of my web page.

Whaddya think? Any takers?

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