Ground Force

The big difficulty with early spring in West Texas is that it's early spring, complete with unpredictable weather, whipping winds and 20-30 degree temperature differences every three days. One way to soothe the gardening bug is to catch up on other good gardening blogs on the net. Sadly, many of the garden shows I loved are no longer on the air and no videos seems available to watch back shows. Gardening By the Yard, Rebecca's Garden, and my favorite, A Gardener's Diary, were a great way to get new ideas and live vicariously through other amazing gardens. Thank goodness P. Allen Smith is still airing.

Imagine my joy to discover that a few DVDs of the BBC series Ground Force had been released. Luckily there are numerous libraries that have the dvds and are willing to loan them via Interlibrary Loan (ILL). This worldwide lending program is so important to patrons who either cannot afford the item(s) and cannot find the item due to rareness. For Texans ILL will be even more important this coming legislative session as proposals for massive slashing for libraries are proposed. So I'm going to take advantage the program now and request as many items as possible before September. Several garden themed books and dvds are hopefully on their way to me.

The first dvd received is the a great show I haven't seen in years. "The Best of Ground Force: Garden Rescues" starts off with screen tests for Alan, Tommy & Charlie, an explanation of how Ground Force came about [BBC wanted a companion show for Changing Rooms with a garden twist] and shows the cast sharing various antedotes on past gardens they've developed along with corresponding show footage. Alan Tichmarsh's last episode is highlighed and it seemed so sad that he left the show when the cast fit together so well. My only fault with the dvd is that its highlights and not full episodes themselves, which is what I was expecting. Especially since I had not seen some of these episodes originally.  Oh well, it was still fun to watch.