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Kelowna radio show garden expert's voice can now be heard on Vancouver Island

Don Burnett, right, and his co-host Ken Salvail, pose for a photo. After almost 40 years of offering garden tips to Kelowna radio listeners, Don Burnett’s Garden Show is expanding to Victoria starting Saturday, Oct. 30, 2021.
Don Burnett, right, and his co-host Ken Salvail, pose for a photo. After almost 40 years of offering garden tips to Kelowna radio listeners, Don Burnett’s Garden Show is expanding to Victoria starting Saturday, Oct. 30, 2021.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Don Burnett

After almost 40 years of offering garden tips to Kelowna radio listeners, Don Burnett’s Garden Show is expanding to Victoria starting Saturday.

It’s something Burnett never pushed for. It was the Victoria station manager who approached him with the idea, just as it wasn’t his idea to start an on-air garden show in the first place. But he is quite excited about taking on a new challenge.

“I’m not going to switch gears too much other than we’re dealing with two different climates,” he told iNFOnews.ca. “They’re a nice solid 7 (climatic zone) and we’re a 5-6 kind of thing. We have alkaline soils and they have acidic soils so there are some differences. Let’s face it, right now they’re still in the throes of annuals and everything. We’re going to have frost this weekend and all our annuals are going to be down.”

There are plants that grow on the Island that don’t grow in the Okanagan but the basics are the same, he said.

READ MORE: How to protect the Okanagan's precious water supply when planting your garden

The AM1150 Garden Show runs Saturday mornings and will now also be carried on CFAX in Victoria. Both are owned by Bell Media.

Brunette was recruited by CKOV radio in 1983 when a new program director decided to put on a garden show. He’d seen Burnett Landscaping trucks driving around town, gave Burnett a call and the rest is a history that involved various radio stations and on-air partners ever since.

Burnett hired Ken Salvail in the mid-1980’s to work in his gardening business and, in 2003, invited Salvail onto the show, from which he never left.

“Ken’s a strong part of the show,” Burnett said. “He’s as strong as I am right now, even though I started the show.”

Salvail brought book learning with him that complements Burnett’s hands-on learning.

Burnett heard about the offer to have the show broadcast in Victoria this summer. It took a couple of months to sort through the technical issues, such as setting up a toll-free phone line for Victoria callers and figuring out how to synchronize commercials and newscasts during the two-hour shows.

READ MORE: Stink bugs are in abundance in the Okanagan this fall

The gardening basics are not such an issue for Burnett but there is some research he will be doing.

“People say, how do you know all this?” he said. “I mean, there might be 150 questions that are asked over the years and you can answer them in a different way to make it sound a little better. We have fun on the show but we do more than just gardening, we do a lot of history stuff. And now I’m going to be doing the same thing for Victoria listeners. I’m going to be really studying up on the history side of Victoria.”

While he’s apprehensive about everything running smoothly, he’s not nervous, noting here’s a lot of Kelowna people living in Victoria.

“It’s probably the easiest thing I’ve ever done,” Burnett said. “I don’t even think about it is as talking to a bunch of people. I just answer gardening questions. It’s quite caller-driven in many ways. When somebody calls and asks a garden questions, I’ve always been able to answer them. If I can’t, I tell them I’ll check it out. Nowadays, with the internet, if I have an issue, I can look it up while I’m on the air.”

Burnett eventually closed his nursery and “went with” Bylands Garden Centre, from which he retired in 2006. He still has a consulting business called The Garden Expert. And he has his home garden to focus more attention on than he was able to do in the past.

“I’m fascinated with the diversity of plants,” Burnett said when asked what he enjoyed most about gardening. “I just love the diversity of the plant world. The plant kingdom has so many facets from cactus and succulents to ferns and lichens and to orchids and woody ornamentals. You just never ever come close to learning even a fraction of the plants that are out there.”

He talked about visiting the Glasgow Botanical Gardens in Scotland in 2016 and being blown away after learning the 30-acre garden only contained 2.5% of the world’s genera. (Genera is the plural for genus. Biology Online says there were an estimated 510,000 genera in 2016. Species exhibiting similar characteristics comprise a genus).

That means there’s lots of new things to learn in the gardening world and it’s not just Burnett and Salvail who will be doing the teaching.

READ MORE: Gardeners from Kamloops, Okanagan offer early season tips

“I think of the show as just talking over the back fence to another gardener,” Burnett said. “So we’re talking to a bunch of gardeners and trading information. Lots of people phone in with advice and thoughts and home remedies. We learn a lot on the radio.”


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