Anne Jaeger
We’ve shared a lot of gardening you and I. And I gotta tell you, it’s taken my mind to a much better place over the past year and a half as I’ve battled a life threatening cancer. The way I see it, the surgery, radiation and chemo is long behind me. As of October, I’m completely cured of lymphoma, a blood disease. I’m on the home stretch now, folks and nothing compares with the sound of that; “cured”. I had a 13% chance of survival, and knock on wood, I’ve made it so far. Yes, gardening did help cure what ails me.
Today, the landscape of my life is blossoming. I’m trying something new and so exciting I could just spit. A new half hour program called “Your Northwest Garden with Anne Jaeger” (Yippy, that’s me!) will air every Saturday evening at 7:00 on Northwest Newschannel 8 (KGW). Let me tell you, putting together a half hour television show every week is an adventure all in itself. Get this: in a half hour program the shots change every three seconds. That’s a lot of plants! I popped in yesterday while they were working on “Your NW Garden with Anne Jaeger” and I’m still speechless. The pictures shot by photographer Kevin Ebel are rich and visually intriguing. The program is fast paced and down right fun. As he was tweeking a show, the director Gary Furlow, turned from the editing machine and smiled at me, saying “This ain’t your usual garden show. It’s a whole different approach.” Yes, indeedy. It has to be.
Most garden shows air in the morning. The standards are much higher for any program airing at 7:00 every Saturday night According to two top executives in charge of the show, Saturday night is a very valuable time period. It is prime time. Program director Brenda Buratti has a long history of heading up solid local shows at the station. Buratti says her goal was to put together a highly experienced team (more than 100 years of television between us) get a new show in the can every two days (TV talk for “completing a show”) and make it fun for anyone to watch (gardener or not). After seeing the first cut of “Your Northwest Garden” her counterpart, Rich Brase, KGW’s promotions director reports it is full of “I didn’t know that moments” and it has great energy. Brase says “very viewer will walk away with something after the show.”
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes? Let’s compare it to something we’re used to seeing. Whether you realize it or not, most news stories are no more than 90 seconds long. That is the industry standard. So, what does it take to get a half hour program done? “Your NW Garden” producer Victoria Elliott (formerly of the Oprah Winfrey Show) figures we shot two full videotapes on our two camera shoot on just one story about planting tomatoes. We were demonstrating an easy solution to prevent those big blackish brown spots on the bottoms of tomatoes (it’s a calcium deficiency, by the way.) Two cameras shooting mean two 30 minute tapes. Imagine trying to whittle down an hour of 3 second shots into less than 5 minutes of airtime? (Think of the trouble most of us have choosing which pictures to use when we’re just trying to make a photo album. Sheesh!) Good editors do it by instinct with an eye for clarity and content. I hope it makes you so excited about gardening you can’t wait to get out and plant. Common on, give it a try, you don’t need to know Latin to have beauty in your backyard. Your Northwest garden is a great place to be. So, it’s time to have fun, kick up our garden clogs and share our gardening goofs and glories every Saturday night at 7. For me, it really doesn’t get any better than this. I’m thankful I lived to see it.
