Green Acres (in Roxbury)

Patti Moreno, TV's Garden Girl, is building a city-oriented, green-thumb empire by bringing herbs, produce, and helpful tips to the masses.

(Photograph by Tanit Sakakini) Patti Moreno.

PATTI MORENO, HER LONG HAIR PULLED BACK IN THE HEAT, FIDDLES with a cucumber plant's tendril on a sunny Friday morning as she rehearses a line. "Wow. Look at my cucumbers. Wow. Look at my cucumbers. Wow. Look at my cucumbers," she says, trying to get it right before a crew begins filming the latest segment of Garden Girl TV.

Slim, petite Moreno seems an unlikely candidate to have built the 6-foot cages where cuke and watermelon vines climb - not to mention the heavy stone walkways winding toward her fish pond and the more than 30 raised planting beds that cover her Roxbury property. But on camera, Moreno comes off as a blend of the best do-it-yourself TV has to offer: as enthusiastic as Paige Davis, as resourceful as Martha Stewart, and as practical as Bob Vila. And she's just getting started building what she hopes will become a vast gardening empire.

In the last year, Moreno has met with the Sundance Channel about hosting some of the cable network's "green" programming and talked to producers at Live With Regis and Kelly about appearing on the show. She's just finishing up her first full season as host of Farmer's Almanac TV for PBS, which will air starting next spring in 270 markets (but not Boston). Later this month, she will launch her Garden Girl line of DVDs, seeds, soil, and mulch at a garden-center trade show in Chicago. And with the help of her filmmaker husband, Robert Patton-Spruill, she's produced a series of online how-to videos that chart, step-by-step, the construction projects and gardening work she's done, as well as some recipes that use garden produce. As of last month, the 70 clips have been watched more than 335,000 times, and 2,500 people are signed up to receive Moreno's twice-monthly e-mail newsletter. If all goes as she plans, Moreno, 36, will be a younger, female made-for-TV Michael Pollan, an entrepreneur and media star whose innovative, experimental products and advice are aimed at sustainable living.

With momentum building, it's worth watching closely to see what happens next. "I think she's the right person for the right time. She has something relevant and pertinent to say, and she presents very well," says David Vos, senior producer and director of This Old House. Moreno and Patton-Spruill went to Vos about a year and a half ago, asking for advice; the producer was impressed. "She's very media savvy, works hard, and is beautiful," says Vos. "She's not just a person who wants to be on TV. She's a person who works hard and has a great idea and wants to be on TV."

The Garden Girl compound, three-quarters of an acre, is just up the road from Roxbury Crossing. When Moreno and her husband bought the plot in 2002, it was surrounded by a series of garages, or bays, where people kept cars for a monthly fee. The couple turned bays into offices and editing rooms for their production company, FilmShack, and live in the Georgian-style house on the property.

The place thumps with activity, largely from the steady crew of Emerson College kids - Patton-Spruill teaches there - who do filming, editing, and even some gardening chores, such as collecting eggs from Moreno's hens. The courtyard in the middle is where Moreno put her main garden, in the form of 16 raised beds she built over gravel because she didn't trust the soil on the grounds. That's one of Garden Girl's key lessons: In the city, you can't trust the dirt. So bring your own. She also has a 40-by-13-foot raised bed "kitchen garden" she built on the property - it's designed to feed her family of three for at least six months of the year - plus coops she built for eight chickens, stalls for two cashmere goats, and hutches for eight angora rabbits. Of course, she uses their hair to spin her own yarn.

Angel Moreno, who lives near West Palm Beach, Florida, can't help but chuckle a little bit when he hears about his daughter's projects. He says he assumed she would go into show business as a singer or actor. He's the one who took her five times to audition for The Cosby Show, and he remembers every play and musical she acted in at The Nightingale-Bamford School, an all-girls private school in Manhattan. "We lived on 23d Street," he says. "There's no dirt there. So I don't know where this came from."

It came, in part, from Moreno's horror at gaining 70 pounds nine years ago when she was pregnant with her daughter. After starting her gardens and losing the weight over eight months by eating only what she grew, Moreno, who went to film school at Boston University and has helped produce three of her husband's movies, got an idea. Why not film her work?

"The idea is great, and Patti has the charisma and connect-ability with people to make a go of it," says Sam Kauffmann, one of Moreno's film professors from BU. "It's her personality that makes it work, plus her knowledge of filmmaking."

Twice a month in the growing season, Moreno and Patton-Spruill set up a farm stand for their neighborhood, in part to serve a community that might not otherwise love the idea of chickens and goats in its midst. On a hot Saturday in mid-July, a woman from Jamaica Plain spends $5 on a dozen eggs, and a young couple walks from Dudley Square to pay $10 for eggs, peppers, and two huge bags of herbs. At the same time, Moreno mixes vodka gimlets on camera with the Genovese and lime basils she has just picked. She and Patton-Spruill sit with their cocktails after the stand is closed, talking about how people from all over the area have come to their Roxbury home for garden tours and to buy produce. Well, except for one nearby community, Moreno says. "The one place I haven't had people come from is Brookline."

"And that's a signal to her," says Patton-Spruill. "When we get one of those people from Brookline to show up . . ."

"Then," Moreno says, "we'll know we crossed over."

Carlene Hempel teaches writing and reporting at Northeastern University's School of Journalism. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.