Suddenly, horticulture is everyplace. Newspapers and magazines ar featuring "grow your possess vege" pieces.
On telly, where there exploited to be only Mucking In, now there's Te Radar's Off the Radar, and Close Up, which had such a response to its recent feature on easy vege growing that it had to put up extra information online.
But doesn't something take you as odd? There is no actual dedicated gardening broadcast on free-to-air telly. Mucking In is a makeover programme, and Off the Radar is about self-sufficiency.
Since the dying of Maggie's Garden Show, there's been nothing truly useful for the pains green fingers to follow, short of turning to the Living Channel on Sky.
TV One made a cut-down variation of Maggie's for a brief stint�- so memorable I can't find its name�- but it was high-gloss and skimpy on information.
Then in that location was an enjoyable romp with a garden game show, in which foursome couples worked four identical plots of land inside a fixed budget, and strict time limits.
But none of that was proper gardening, in any educative sense.
Dumping a load of chocolatey compost here and there, sowing Potted Colour and scattering pebbles around a few flax bushes can give you a temporarily fashionable look.
But it's decorating, non gardening.
It's to be hoped that someone out thither in TV land can persuade one of the channels to give a decent slot for a new record with meaningful content, since there's today an nearly hysterical interest in ontogenesis your possess veges.
A combination of man recession, nursery emissions trading and occupy about vitamin content, genetic engineering and pesticides has found a therapeutic outlet here, and there mustiness be a growing new audience. No longer is gardening an old fogey's habit.
Children are being taught about it through school food gardens, and 20-somethings are making with the trowel because it's trendy.
Popularity is oft irrelevant when it comes to telecasting scheduling, however. The first base question to ask is: Would a gardening broadcast fit with the kind of image our advertisers want to align themselves with?
The second is: Can such a show happen a sponsor? Up against the plague of body makeover shows on Friday night�- for generations the gardening evince night on New Zealand TV�- wholesomely earthy bunches of newly yanked carrots simply wouldn't be a match for the wonders of Botox and what to do about a wobbly bottom.
Still, Off the Radar isn't a unfit start, in terms of inspiring the average couch-sitter to shackle a little with the backyard.
After episode two (TV One lowest Sunday), you wondered whether anything could be nicer than an outdoor-cooked, fresh, organic meal, after a day's energetic and pleasurable labour to produce the ingredients.
Well, yes, a cold beer, and some sort of�- believably inorganic - pudding would have rounded it off nicely, Te Radar admitted. But it's an gratifying call to arms for productive land-based pursuits, information-dense and good-humoured.
If you were worried that having a professional comedian would be an irritant, Te Radar blessedly keeps the showing-off to a minimum, as he seems genuinely overwhelmed with how wonderful a time he's having under canvas in a large paddock with chooks and cows for company (and a photographic camera crew, just it's surprisingly easy to forget that).
The other unmissable TV gardening experience�- which this commentator has managed to omit most of, but it's bound to be recurrent often�- is Around the World In Eighty Gardens, which Sky's Living Channel is playing on Sundays.
It features British TV gardener and writer Monty Don�- who is pretty much as lustworthy as the gardens he presents�- touring some of the most remarkable, distinctive and beautiful gardens on every continent, from raked, stilted Asian gardens to confections of prairie grass.
In a altogether different, inorganic and almost idiotic nervure, Sky's UKTV has been replaying 1960s episodes of The Saint on weekday afternoons, and I defy anyone of any historic period not to find them thoroughly entertaining.
The plots ar beyond lame by today's standards, and the characters less rounded than those you'd find oneself in Tintin.
But they give you a blast of fashion - the clothes and cars�- of the time. The dialogue is surprisingly bubbling. "Are you a role model?" says a lustful edward Young woman to Simon Templar. "Er, no, I opine you'll find I'm actual-sized," smirks the debonair and slightly creepy Saint.
Roger Moore - later a memorable James Bond�- in pallid, ungrubby-able suits, fist-fights the villains, but never to the point of disarranging his Brylcreemed hair. And every baddie is knocked unconscious with a single blow.
No Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis or Matt Damon character prat manage that.
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