Questions For Radio Gardening Shows

A WAY TO GARDEN was recommended as a top-5 garden podcast in "The Guardian" newspaper last week, citing recent updates to the format of my weekly public-radio show. Hooray! But since I started hosting the program last month, the tradition of a monthly question-and-answer segment, featuring your best questions, got lost. Asking and answering questions all alone, out loud, seemed like something best reserved for the privacy of my own home. Solution: The Q&A feature was revived this week with the help of my sister, Marion Roach Smith, originator of the Urgent Garden Question, who joined me on air. How to get your question answered next time (and more on "The Guardian" piece):

Marion (with an impressive cabbage, below), is like her older sister and our parents a writerly type. Decades ago she began leaving voicemails that always started with, "I've got an Urgent Garden Question," and then revealed her latest horticultural crisis. In the early years, I suspected she was just trying to come up with an ice-breaker, and didn't really need advice.

Marion Roach Smith with a cabbage from farm market

We'd had some rough patches, as sisters do, and I knew she had a Master Gardener certificate—so why did she need my help? But it gave us a reason to speak, and get past things that had been in the way. For that I thank her (as I did in this 1989 essay and have been doing ever since). And I thank her for helping me solve my "how to do Q&A on the air" question, too.

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have a question to ask?

WE'LL PUT OUT A CALL for your latest questions on Facebook before each Q&A edition of the radio show, and you can also ask here on the blog anytime. Each month I'll gather the best ones—best as in likely to be most helpful to others—and answer them on the air.

a way to garden praised in 'the guardian'

WRITER SHEILA AVERBUCH named A Way to Garden, the radio show and podcast produced with Robin Hood Radio (the smallest NPR station in the nation), as one of her top-5 garden shows last week. The astonishing thing: the others on the list! Four were BBC-produced, and one's from the Royal Horticultural Society–meaning I had better get my act together (and perhaps adopt a proper accent for speaking English?) or else a fall from grace is certainly just ahead. Find all five shows to enjoy in this story from "The Guardian."