Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Whether you love or hate reality TV, everybody is talking about the Real Housewives of Auckland. TV veteran Louise Wallace talks to Kerre McIvor about choosing to be on TV designed to appall and shock.

Resident book reviewer Catherine Raynes joins Kerre McIvor to review Nothing Short of Dying by Erik Storey (Simon and Schuster, $35), and

Leave Me by Gayle Forman (Simon and Schuster, $33).

Kevin Milne wows Kerre McIver with outrageous stories from the Auckland Home Show, including goldfish encased in shower doors and touchscreen stove splashbacks. Aucklanders have the money, they're in a hurry, and they want what they like, and they want it now, he says.

Not all pots and pans are created equal. What makes one pot cost $12 and another of a similar size cost over $500? What is each really worth? How do you get the black stuff off a pot when it does burn?

Le Creuset is opening a store in Auckland – these pots are 'forever cookware', the price and quality says so.  And they’ve been making them in France since 1925. They’re handcrafted cast iron and I have 3 of them which I treasure. A garage sale gave me one for $1 when I as in my early 20’s. You can make Xmas cakes I the pots and use the lids for cooking pizza!

Resident movie reviewer Darren Bevan joins Jack Tame to take a look at the new Richie McCaw biopic Chasing Great, a new chapter for Ricky Gervais' alter-ego in David Brent: Life on the Road, and Helen Mirren drone thriller Eye in the Sky.

Ever wondered what it might be like to live for a year on Mars? Well, an audacious collection of scientists have attempted to do just that over the last 365 days - only they were in Hawaii. 

The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission attempted to model what it might be like for astronauts to exist in extreme isolation, with each other, on a hostile planet (in this case, a volcano). 

Carmel Johnston was the mission commander, and she joined Jack Tame this morning for a chat.

The gardens in Hamilton feature all the main garden design styles, from Italian renaissance to Japanese to English cottage garden and American modernism, but they also have an excellent range of ideas for Kiwi backyards, including a permaculture garden, so I thought let's talk about simple ways to be a bit more sustainable in your back garden:

1. As the calendar ticks over into spring, and you suddenly start buying lots of plants in plastic pots, ask your local garden centre if they offer recycling. Many will have a collection area for pots to be recycled. Or, stack them up neatly and use them when sowing seeds or taking cuttings or potting up divisions of your favourite plants to share with others. Don't just biff them in the rubbish. 

2. Making compost is a no-brainer but it can be quite difficult in a small garden. An easier, no-fuss, no-stink way to recycle kitchen scraps is to dig a long trench across your vegetable garden, about 30cm deep, and bury your scraps in a layer 10cm deep. Cover with soil and plant salad greens and leafy vegetables on top. 

3. Wilt your weeds before you compost them. If you attack your garden in a gung-ho, get-it-all-done-in-one-weekend sort of fashion, you invariably end up with a huge pile of green waste that fills your entire compost heap. So, if you have a concrete path or driveway, dump the weeds on that for a week until they wilt; they'll shrink in volume by a third, then put them in your bin. Or rot weeds down in a barrel of water with some comfrey and seaweed and chook manure to make liquid fertiliser.

4. Reserve an area for bee and beneficial insect fodder, which means flowers. Chuck in a packet of wildflower seeds and let them go to it. 

5. Don't spray. Or if you do spray, choose more natural options. 

And if any of you  have burning horticultural questions, bring them along to the Get Growing Roadshow from 11am today and tomorrow at Hamilton Gardens and Lynda will hand out some free advice.

Mike Durant is a highly-decorated American combat helicopter pilot who was taken prisoner during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 - the events which inspired the film Black Hawk Down. 

Durant is now the subject of a National Geographic documentary, and he joined Jack Tame this morning to discuss the story

Kevin Milne joins Jack Tame to extend his condolences to the family of former Newstalk ZB host Justin du Fresne, and to discuss knitting - a hobby or past-time that men used to do without shame or fear. And yet now, some men wouldn't be seen dead near a yarn of wool. That ought to change, Kevin reckons.

Jack Tame opens his show this morning by talking about going to a concert that was ecstatic, jubilant, patriotic, and celebratory. It went on for four hours, and Jack can sure see why people are turned to religion by environments like this.