Ask the Garden Pros with Jim and Keith

ASK THE GARDEN PROS with JIM & KEITH
SATURDAY 7-9 AM

Colorado's Most Knowledgeable & Entertaining Garden Experts,
Keith Funk and Jim Borland.

Join Radio Talk Show Hosts Keith and Jim every Saturday morning from 7-9 on AM 1430 KEZW for garden tips, information and news that gardening listeners can use right now. On the air since January of 1994, The Garden Pros have become the top-rated radio garden talk show in Colorado. Lighthearted, but serious answers are given to call-in garden questions from high in the mountains to far out on the plains.

Special, on-air features include conversations with area garden center representatives and news highlights that feature fresh ideas, new plants, hot products and the latest from horticultural science.

Jim and Keith are admirably suited to bring to their audience the very best in gardening information since both are well-versed in all aspects of horticulture.

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Hosted by Jim Borland and Keith Funk, everything you ever wanted to know about gardening… indoors, outdoors, in between doors, in the basement or attic.  Whether your plants are thriving, dead or at death’s door, we want to know about it.  

Jim and Keith have hosted a radio garden show since 1994 and they intend to keep at it until they get it right.  Getting up at 0’dark-thirty every Saturday morning, braving wild and domesticated animals, through clement and inclement weather, they muscle their way to the studio, arriving bright-eyed and bushy tailed (Fat Chance!) to take your always cogent and thoughtful calls while downing copious cups of coffee.  

With an ability to time travel, Jim and Keith can diagnose both past and future plant problems enabling callers and listeners to have a better gardening experience.  Features on the show include: new plants (including the never-ending Echinacea cultivars), rants and raves, classes, contest questions (and prizes), plant shows and the latest in gardening junk and art.  Pliny the 1,000 year old gardener drops by on occasion.  Visitors to the radio show should be aware that we have listener ID.

Visitors are invited to the show via, internet, snail mail, email, Facebook, texting, smart phone APP and soon to be launched 32 geo-synchronous communication satellites and a squadron of plant-seeking garden drones.
 

Free Smart Phone App!
The free Smart Phone App can be downloaded by calling 720-443-0120. When the friendly female recording prompts you, say "Garden Pros". A text will be sent to your smart phone with a link to click on. Then just follow the instructions provided. Make sure you always scroll to the bottom of each screen to make sure you have completed each step. There are also instructions on downloading another free smart phone app called Flycast from which you can listen to the radio live on your phone. That way you can listen to The Garden Pros from anywhere!!! And who wouldn't want that? 

Jim got his start gardening when, as a child, his mother told him to weed the rock garden.  Within a few minutes he found an arrowhead and he has been looking for more ever since.  He calculates that he has killed more than 8,567 plants while coaxing a couple to live long enough to brag on them.  A lazy gardener, he has stopped watering his front yard yet is able to grow more than 125 species of woody plants and innumerable perennial, biennial and annual plants.  While his co-host has a garden worth complimenting, Jim is often asked if he needs help cleaning his up.  Though he installs a hammock in the backyard each summer, he has yet to use it more than twice a year.  Helping him garden are a coterie of foxes, raccoons, skunks, cats, coyotes, squirrels, mice, dogs and a wife who won’t let him into her side of the garden until holes have to be dug, grass cut or garden debris hauled off to the compost pile.

At least two universities have let him into their classrooms and on that he then ran a start-up native plant nursery before being hired to put roots onto plant cuttings at the Denver Botanic Gardens.  Men have stood out in their field, but Jim has stood out in a forest where he managed all flora and fauna issues related to a Ponderosa pine ecology entwined among 850 homeowners.  

Jim’s personal garden contains a pawpaw tree, a persimmon tree, an osage orange tree, chocolate flowers (that actually smell a lot like vanilla), spearmint, bamboos, rhododendrons, azaleas, a small sequoia tree, 2 paxistima species, manzanitas and 300 pots of recently sowed seed that will result in yet more plants that he can kill.  He makes his own soil derived from a 25 cubic yard compost pile consisting of debris from the kitchen, the yard, his neighbor’s yard, paper shreddings and the occasional cork from wine bottles (though his beverage of choice is single malt).

Keith’s first memory of gardening goes way back to when he was 6 years old working in his grandparents’ vegetable garden in Kansas.  There, hanging from short bushy plants were GIANT black olives.  A few short minutes of elation were burst after just one bite of the majestic fruits.  He has held a grudge against eggplant to this day.  But that didn’t stop him from nurturing his love of all things green and growing.

After graduating with a BS in Ornamental Horticulture and an MS in Urban Landscape Design, Keith and his wife moved to Colorado and fell in love with gardening in the dry high plains and mountains of the west... eventually.   Keith’s home grounds are heavily planted and feature a garden pond and waterfall, as well as a vegetable garden (no eggplant), rock and alpine gardens, massive perennials beds mixed with a variety of trees and shrubs, a modest amount of lawn and crowned with a greenhouse full of orchids.  No hammock here.

While Keith grows many of the native and dryland plants that Jim does, Keith prefers to water as needed and maintain a more traditional landscape.  He calculates Jim has killed far more plants than he has because of Jim’s hammock indulgent, single malt lifestyle.