SHERINSKI GIVES ADVICE IN 14 TV MARKETS

Joe Sherinski is good at many things: landscaping, gardening, making beer, talking. He is a handy man to have around the house and especially around the yard. Some TV executives think so. Gardening and landscaping segments produced by Cape Girardeau's Red Letter Communications and featuring the affable Sherinski are being broadcast to a potential audience of nearly 1 million viewers.

Garden Power" is a 90-second vignette distributed to 14 television markets across the United States. It is seen locally on WSIL-TV in Harrisburg, Ill., between 6:30 and 7 a.m. from March to November. "The Great Outdoors with Joe Sherinski" is a four-minute spot in "Michael Holigan's Your New House" seen weekdays nationally on the Discovery Channel. The show is seen locally at 5 p.m.

The Jackson resident is a longtime local landscaper and nurseryman who got his start on TV as "Mr. Good Garden," a segment that began running on KFVS-TV in 1994. Mike Beecher, KFVS's news director, had noticed Sherinski's ability to talk when the latter did some landscaping for him. The New York native left KFVS because he wanted to syndicate the segment and concluded after 130 episodes that the TV station didn't have the same interest. Six months later, Red Letter Communications offered the deal he was looking for.

On the Holigan show, Sherinski gives viewers a four-minute drill on such topics as composting or mounting outdoor lighting.

Sherinski says he won out over other candidates for the job because TV executives were looking for a certain personality for the 5 p.m. "crossover" time slot -- someone who appealed both to the women who watch the channel during the day and the men who represent the majority of nighttime viewers. He comes across as a regular guy who would hang a bird feeder.

In the past, anyone who was on TV automatically was considered an expert, Sherinski says. That isn't so true today, but he seems to have the knack."I'm able to stand in front of a camera, say stuff and people believe me," he said. His knowledge is grounded in a degree in landscape horticulture and many years of experience working for nurseries. Although he admits he sometimes has to research his topics. "I learn every day that I don't know enough," he says.

Men whose wives might wish them to be more like Joe around the house will be glad to know he doesn't understand computers, he can't walk through the woods and identify trees and he doesn't like to work on his car, preferring dirt on his hands to grease.

He likes to make gardening fun and is quick with a joke, though he is more constrained on his current segments than on KFVS. When his son, Adam, asked to do a cameo, Sherinski included him in a segment about firewood. While Sherinski advised the audience that "cutting firewood is a lot like work," Adam did the work.

Jim Riley, who owns Red Letter Communications, says the company has more plans for Sherinski's talents: more TV products, a syndicated newspaper column, radio pieces and Internet services. "All of that we hope is on the horizon," he says.

Most of the segments are videotaped around Riley's house.

Besides running his landscaping business, Sherinski also sells invisible fencing, a product that keeps dogs in the yard by emitting a radio signal that provides them with a "tactile correction" when they try to stray.

He makes his own beer, not for profit, but because the dark, imported kind he prefers is so expensive. He emcees the beer-tasting dinners sponsored semimonthly by In the Wine Cellar."In some circles I'm known as Mr. Good Beer Garden," he says.