Putting Down Roots: Gardening Localizes the Weather Story

Gardening is as old as human civilization, yet in our fast-paced world, the hobby remains as popular as ever. I am the creator and host of a weekly segment, Garden Guide, which empowers people to grow a garden with tips that keep our local climate in mind. Garden Guide is my contribution to News12 Network’s “Local Matters” brand, but the audience contributes too. The segment has earned a large and loyal following over the past year, and gardeners have made it an invaluable resource for local weather data and an opportunity to facilitate authentic brand loyalty.

Modern technology has threatened to make our livelihoods entirely obsolete. How can traditional newscasts compete with shrinking attention spans and a world of information at our fingertips? The idea of waiting months or years for a harvest contradicts today's culture of “instant gratification” at its core. Even though a green thumb does not come easily, gardening manages to remain relevant. Gardeners cultivate a stronger sense of community and the hobby offers stability in a world with a food supply threatened by pandemics and climate change. As a meteorologist and passionate gardener, I am able to use my platform to share locally relevant tips with information viewers can trust and can’t find anywhere else.

WLTX’s legendary former Chief Meteorologist, Jim Gandy, saw how climate change was threatening our nation’s food supply and sprung into action. He created a garden just steps away from the station to educate people about growing food while raising awareness about the effect of weather on agricultural production. In 2019, Jim Gandy retired, and I joined the team and continued the garden project.

I have always used my passion for gardening to make the weather story more interesting and relevant, but in 2020 I saw firsthand how the hobby could foster strong community bonds too. During the pandemic, I noticed how people were turning to gardening to bring a sense of stability to their lives. I started a Facebook group to share what I was doing to create a peaceful and tasty paradise in WLTX’s Gandy’s Garden and encouraged other viewers to grow plants with me in their gardens and share their photos and questions. Thousands of members have joined, and many of them have created lifelong bonds and friendships.

I continued this work in New York where the audience is used to more time indoors and smaller yards, but the garden segment continues to be as relevant and popular as it was in South Carolina. News12 has a “StormWatchers” program that encourages people to send weather photos, but some of our best local weather information has come from gardeners pointing their cameras down into flowers and foliage.

Plants are nature’s barometer, and gardeners have a lot of data to share. They give us unbiased data about how our local climate is shifting. It’s a community-oriented hobby where people share thoughts, ideas, and even plants with each other. All successful gardeners are in touch with the weather and how it is changing. It’s proof that sometimes fantastic weather information can happen from cameras pointing down not upward.