Bonus episode 1: Introducing 'Garden Words' from the James & Joe Garden Show

A new bonus series for Garden Collective members.

If you watch the James and Joe Garden Show, you’ll know how it usually opens. This one doesn’t. Garden Words is a new bonus series made just for Garden Collective subscribers. As Joe points out, part of what you’re paying for is not having to hear James sing.

How it works

Each episode, James and Joe write a gardening word on a slip of paper and drop it into James’s battered old Australian hat. They pull one out and talk about it for ten minutes. Then they stop, or try to.

Episode one: Dibber

The first word out of the hat is dibber. Ten minutes on one of the humblest tools in the shed turns out to cover a lot of ground:

What actually counts as a dibber: pencils, chopsticks, a de-bristled wooden toothbrush, and Carol Klein’s “mini mini dibber”
A memory of playing Just a Minute at Malvern with Gyles Brandreth, who didn’t know what a dibber was and still won every round
A disastrous live attempt at a dibber round, with repetition everywhere
Joe’s triangle-shaped allotment, and the stranger who shouted “Triangles!” at him from the top of a Camden bus
Dobbing, a northern allotment word for planting plugs in fast, and why Phil McCann may be the best name in horticulture
Whether seed-packet planting depths really matter (mostly not) and whether the bulb auger has made the dibber redundant
A cameo from Frank
The spurtle: a porridge stick, a Christmas present a decade in the making, and why it’s really just a dibber in disguise

Put a word in the hat

This series runs on your words. Send us a gardening word, plant name, tool or term you’d like James and Joe to take on, and it goes in the hat. It might even come out.

We’re still working on a name, too. “Garden Wordle” and “the Garden Spurtle” are both in the running. Better ideas are very welcome.

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