15 minutes of fame for Graham the Grumpy Gardener

I believe it was Andy Warhol who said that everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. Well, I’ve just had mine.

Regional Radio

The organisers of national Slug Week (5 – 11 April), in which children and families are asked to go into their gardens and count slugs and measure the largest, asked me to talk about it on BBC Radio Devon.

Well, it obviously struck a chord because I then did interviews on radio stations in Manchester, Coventry and Warwickshire, Kent, Derby and Somerset.

The interviewers all thought it was a clever idea to attract the children and encourage them to look into different aspects of wildlife – even slugs.

All things slugs

I did a bit of research and threw in some interesting slug facts. Did you know that slugs can have as many as 27,000 teeth, have their own individual slime trails and a cubic metre of garden soil contains an average of 200 slugs? Slug Week was organised by the company that makes Nemaslug, a nematode-based slug control.

Most of the interviewers didn’t know what nematodes are so I explained they are microscopic worms that live naturally in garden soil where one variety seeks out and destroys slugs.

Early start

Unfortunately, most of the interviews were over the Easter weekend and I was on air between 7.20am and 7.50am. The Bank Holiday alarm didn’t delight Mrs GG but, despite the early start, all the interviewers said that I didn’t sound remotely grumpy. However you, dear readers, know better than that!

Happy Gardening!

The Grumpy Gardener