I just stumbled upon a blog post from Jedda at Olliphants where she has started a gardening experiment with her kids.

To set the scene, this is no gardening blog. It’s just a personal journal of a mum in Geelong, Victoria.

The post shows how Jedda, and her kids, are trialling a hydroponics arrangement, including none other than styrofoam cups, after seeing a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s2374989.htm">Gardening Australia</a> episode. She even links to another blogger in Melbourne who shares her own garden experiments.

Why am I telling you all this?

Primarily because I’m a curious sod who gets a little excited and jittery when I see people – who don’t profess to be gardeners – start to experiment with the plant kingdom. While all us hard-core gardeners love to slang off at so-called “gardening TV shows” it seems that they have some benefit after all, if nothing else but to entice normal folk into the realms of gardening. That’s got to be a good thing, doesn’t it?

Where can all this experimentation lead? Who knows. Perhaps they will enjoy some incredible success and go on to becoming a Master Gardener. Maybe they won’t. I’m not sure it really matters but I always hold out hope that when people begin to get their hands soiled their appetite for nature will grow.

On a side tangent, but closely related, it seems that <a href="https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,26278,24522214-10229,00.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jamie Durie’s “Outdoor Rooms”</a> will be axed fairly soon. Not that I’m too disappointed, it was basically the-garden-you-create-when-you-have-tons-of-mullah-type-show that didn’t have much in the way of gardening in it – unless you count using a pole-digger to drop hundreds of foliage plants into the ground as gardening. C’est la vie.