For those of you who do not have cable television, you may not know the Napa County Master Gardeners have their own TV show, affectionately called MGTV. It airs on local public access cable Channel 28, currently on Thursdays at 11 a.m. and Saturdays at 7 p.m.
The show has been both challenge and an adventure for those of us on the television committee, involving long hours of training time at Channel 28. Even though we had a master teacher in Channel 28's James "Mr. Audio" Raymond, we still experienced huge learning curves on using all of the equipment as well as editing the show on the computer.
Looking back at our earlier shows, we are somewhat embarrassed with what we see. The first show was filled with every possible technical error. In the beginning we failed to properly set the mysterious "white balance" and shot complete segments through what appear to be rose-colored sunglasses. We also learned the hard way about some of the features on the video camera that we were not supposed to touch, by taping an entire segment at Sharon Lampton's garden completely out of focus. We learned how important it is to properly place microphones on the hosts, when some of the audio was too low on one show. And I, for one, will never again appear in front of the camera. I am now one of the people BEHIND the camera. With over 100 members, we have plenty of good looking, eloquent and knowledgeable Master Gardeners to appear as hosts!
After we taped our first show we learned that it had to be assembled, edited and burned to DVD within five days. With the deadline looming in front of me and never having used the required software, I sat down with the 400-page manual on my lap and completed the editing in 18 hours. All this for a 30-minute segment!
MGTV celebrated its first anniversary in April, and each show has gotten a little better than the previous one. This proves (at least in my case) that you CAN teach an old dog new tricks, however slowly.
We soon realized that we wanted to get out of the studio and get out into the garden. Over the past year we have visited many of the Master Gardeners' gardens. We taped at least a dozen ways to support pole beans, including Ruth Acona's pantyhose trellising system. We saw roses in Nancy Wilson's Calistoga garden, plants for butterflies and worm composting techniques in Penny Pawl's Napa garden.
Other episodes featured Master Gardener John Hoffman giving a tour of the trees at Fuller Park with information from his beautiful book, The Trees of Napa Valley.