Fine Gardening How-To DVDs

I try to learn about gardening by every means possible. Books, magazines, workshops, seminars, TV shows, radio shows, podcasts and DVDs have all been employed to address my large knowledge deficit.

Taunton Press, the publisher of the superior Fine Homebuilding and the excellent Fine Gardening magazines, has also come out with a series of DVDs on gardening. I’ve purchased several – the latest being the “How-To Series: Gardening Techniques Vol. 3″. The focus of this DVD is on soil improvement, something that has been a big part of my activity in the past few months.

A few notes about these DVDs: they are data disks and don’t play on a DVD player. They work on a computer that plays DVDs. I suspect that they may work better on Macs (my choice) than PCs as you can simply click on an icon and get to work. (How Mac-like!) On a PC, you have to load some sort of application to use the disk. And while there are videos on the disk, much of the material is simply taken from the pages of Fine Gardening. So it is more interactive (and the viewer is less passive) than many gardening DVDs.

The DVD is excellent for someone like me. First, I tend to be a pack-rat about magazines. I keep them, thinking that I’m going to re-read an article sometime. (I have a plan to address this — but it’s for next winter.) And I have a collection of Fine Gardening magazines going back at least two years. So these DVDs provide a great excuse to recycle those old magazines. Second, I tend to read a bit — which sparks a question and then wander off to find the answer. The DVD allows for that without losing my place. Or the article.

My only complaint is that it is a very high-tech collection of magazine articles. The videos on the disk are very good — I just wish all the topics were videos. It’s because I am lazy and would rather be watching and listening than reading. And have Heather Locklear demonstrate the gardening. That would be awesome.