Alan Titchmarsh says there's one thing left on bucket list as he launches new project

At the age of 75 Alan Titchmarsh is about to launch a brand new venture. The former Ground Force star has been gardening since he was a teenager, quitting school at 15 for a job as an apprentice with Ilkley Council

The seasons are changing and with Spring in the air Alan Titchmarsh is growing a new audience as well as lots of seeds and bulbs in his garden. At 75 he could be forgiven for taking things a bit easier, but instead he says he spends mornings writing and then after lunch heads to the garden for a few hours solid work in the earth.

And now you will be able to watch along with him and get tips from his garden as he is launching a new YouTube channel offering gardening tips to young and old alike.

Alan seems unfazed by the move and tells me he already has fans on instagram from Australia, Mexico, Scandinavia, Germany. He says: "I think the thing about YouTube is it has a really broad audience and a lot of them are young, but I'm not, I hope, a boring old fart talking. I mean, I don't think about my age ever. I'm still me, and there's so much of the 15-year-old me who left school to go and be a gardener still in me.

"I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it keeps you interested in it, keeps you alive and lively. I want to make it easy to understand. And if I can have a few gosh moments in it, that'd be really quite nice.

"At least I can hopefully get out there some reliable information, but not just, you know, lecturing, or 'this is how you do it', but hopefully being engaging and slightly amusing. We are starting in April so it's seeds, it's planting some flowering bulbs. It's looking after your lawn bit. So it really is, you know, the high spot, really, in the year. Things are moving."

One set of fans who might not be able to see him just yet are those in North Korea. YouTube is banned there and when Alan's 2010 show Garden Secrets aired last year he hit the headlines as his blue jeans were pixelated. Jeans are seen as a symbol of western imperialism in the secretive state and as such are banned.

Alan remembers it well and says with a chuckle: "I am happy to go there to film, but I'll only do it from the waist up!"

Alan remains popular both at home and abroad. He has his own TV show on ITV, Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh and of course has been involved in other huge hits down the years like Garden Force and Gardeners' World.

Then there are the books......he is now writing novel number 13 and his book How to be a Gardener Book One: Back to Basic was a best seller with over 600,000 copies sold. But he is clearly very proud of his own stories which include some raunchy early titles Jilly Cooper might be proud of Debut Mr MacGregor was about a TV gardener with a fatal sexual magnetism.

"The thing is, I don't ask or I hope for anything else. If it all stops tomorrow. I ain't complaining," he adds. "But I would like to see one of my novels turned into either TV series or a film. They've never been translated into the screen, and I quite fancy that, y'know the works done, somebody else can do the screenplay.

"That is about the only thing on the bucket list. Everything else, I've been so lucky to have done so many things I enjoy and I like nothing more now than the sun shining than being out in the garden, pottering still, because it's making something beautiful. And I love doing that."

His days start early at the Grade-II listed Hampshire farmhouse he lives in with wife Alison. "I get up fairly early, sometime between six and seven, and I start writing early. By one o'clock, I'm pretty spent in terms of writing, and my reward is to go out into the garden now after lunch.

"I have friends who retired 10 years ago, of course. But I do now for a living, what they all have been doing in retirement, either writing a book or gardening. So yes my job's lovely and I have been very lucky."

As ever, Alan is being modest and it is not all down to luck. He has been gardening since he was a teenager, quitting Ilkley county secondary school at 15 for a job as an apprentice gardener with Ilkley Council.

And over 60 years later he must have seen most things happen to his flowers and crops in that time. He insists he owes others in the TV industry a debt of gratitude as he didn't push himself the way some other young people might now trying to get onto the screen on reality TV.

And despite his confidence on screen now, he admits being shy and unconfident growing up. "Life finds you out if you let it. If I could give advice to my younger self I'd just say 'you can afford to be a bit more confident. You do have a right to be here. You're not just making up the numbers'.

"Growing up in Yorkshire, I was way away, away from anywhere, that anything remotely, supposedly exciting was happening. Though I loved my life in the Yorkshire Dales. It was a blissful childhood, but I think I felt I was being a bit of a loner.

"I have loved my career path, but the implication that it says it was planned and it wasn't. I've just allowed life and people to nudge me.

"And I'm really blessed by meeting people who said 'you should', because often people see things in yourself that you don't see. There's half a dozen people throughout my life that I'm enormously grateful to for being kind enough to encourage."

Looking ahead to the YouTube channel and what it might include, he thinks he will aim for an eight minute video each week filmed at his Hampshire home. But he is open to ideas and changes and may do some videos answering questions from fans too as well as giving tips and showing practical things where he gets his hands dirty.

As we chat Alan is about to start filming ready for the launch and he says April is a great time to start but also the UK in general is a great place to be gardening, because of the ever changing weather.

"I think the lovely thing about gardening in the contemporary climate is seasonality, there is the fact that the snowdrops really come back, they've now faded. It's now daffodils everywhere.

"But then they'll start to go, and the tulips will come up, and then we'll follow them with things like peonies. And it's the fact we go through having a different favourite flower every month of the year in the UK, right the way through, every single month there is always something to look at, and that's what keeps you going.

"So when people say, 'What's your favourite flower?' at the moment it is daffodils because they're looking lovely, and it will certainly tulips, because they're on their way now. We've been a sort of melting pot for horticulture in this country.

"Also in mainland Europe, the vast majority of people rent their homes. We buy and when you buy something and you've got a piece of land with it, you want to know what to do with it and you want to make the best of it. For me, it's the variety which is the big thing I love."

Gardening with Alan Titchmarsh launches on YouTube and other social media platforms this April