Listener feedback for 19 March 2022.

Organic gardener Kath Irvine returns to share some autumn gardening tips and to answer your questions,. This is a time in the garden for both harvesting and preparing for winter. Kath shares some advice on apple picking and storing, and planting your winter crops.

"I'll be grand, girl, I've great faith," Noelle McCarthy's mother Carol told her just before she died. Raised in the Irish city of Cork, Noelle “ran away” to New Zealand as a young woman, but things changed when her mother gets sick. The writer and broadcaster explores "mothers and daughters, drinking, birth and loss, running away and homecoming" in her new memoir Grand: Becoming My Mother's Daughter.

Gabriel Gatehouse's BBC podcast series The Coming Storm, not only delves into QAnon's origins but how it remains a major force within the Republican party. Previously a BBC foreign correspondent, Gabriel Gatehouse is international editor of Newsnight and co-host of daily BBC podcast Ukrainecast.

Ann Goldstein has been translating the work of celebrated Italian author Elena Ferrante for close to two decades. However, Goldstein has never met or even spoken to the pseudonymous author, and is only able to communicate through her publisher. Yet, the success of Ferrante's work in the English-speaking world has made Goldstein one of the best-known translators in America today. This unusual collaboration comes into view again this month with the release of Ferrante's new title In The Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. Billed by The Guardian as one of the most anticipated titles of 2022, the book is comprised of four essays that offer a rare look at the origins of Ferrante's literary powers, encompassing both her influences and her struggles. Goldstein recently retired from The New Yorker, where she worked for 45 years, for the most part presiding over the copy editing department.

China's lockdowns are a worry for the global economy, adding pressure to the supply chain and contributing to higher prices around the world. Rodney Jones is an economist and principal of Wigram Capital Advisors, an Asian-based macro advisory firm which conducts Covid modelling.

Now installed in central Berlin is a fully functional, open source cellphone tower that, in luminous hot pink, asking to be noticed. It's the work of New Zealand artist, activist and 'critical engineer' Julian Oliver who returned to Upper Hutt when Covid-19 struck.

Alan Jansson is arguably best known for his role in helping to create OMC's 1995 smash hit 'How Bizarre', but more than a decade earlier the producer and engineer was pioneering New Zealand electronica as a founding member of The Body Electric. Formed from the ashes of Wellington punk band The Steroids in 1982, The Body Electric started as a two-piece with Jansson and Andy Drey, who were later joined by actor Garry Smith on vocals. Despite being largely ignored by radio, their debut single 'Pulsing' was a hit, and spent 27 weeks in the charts. Almost 40 years on, Flying Nun is set to re-release The Body Electric's 1983 album Presentation and Reality, plus The Body Electric 12" with four remastered tracks from the same era.

Years in the making, the Waitemata Table Tennis Club in Auckland recently opened a purpose-built table tennis stadium to the tune of $2 million. The modern building replaced the previous stadium that had been built by volunteers in the 1970s using second-hand materials. The project came to fruition thanks to the help of Simon Fenwick, an architectural designer who in the 1990s travelled around the world playing table tennis.

When Irish economist David McWilliams spoke to RNZ in October 2020 - roughly six months into the pandemic - he said it was time for governments to spend and ignore warnings to the contrary. Eighteen months down the track, Covid-19 is still wreaking havoc and recent world events have thrown the economy into further turmoil.