Producers of the public television show "Ask This Old House" gave Josie Bowman and her fiance, Nathan Kopf, a free backyard makeover May 13.

But they also put the young couple to work for the camera.

"C'mon, Josie, I want to really see you get down in the mud," said no-nonsense director David Vos, as a cameraman filmed the 26-year-old kindergarten teacher pulling apart a flower bed in her Hampden yard and loading the bricks into a wheelbarrow.

"Josie, can you pull that wheelbarrow?" Vos asked.

Bowman, who is pregnant, gave it a shot.

"No," she said.

Vos then turned her into an actress, instructing her to dig dramatically in the flower bed and throw the bricks in the wheelbarrow with some oomph.

"I absolutely love that shot," he said, watching on a hand-held TV monitor.

"I'm glad for you," Bowman said.

Bowman, who teaches at Lakewood Elementary School in east Baltimore, and Kopf, a graduate student studying chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, moved here in 2008 from Madison, Wis.

They loved the three-story, three-bedroom row house they bought in the 3700 block of Roland Avenue between St. Thomas Aquinas Church and the Hampden fire station.

"But the back yard needed help," Bowman said. At 17 by 12 feet, it was little more than a postage stamp, with patchy grass, a neighbor's tree pushing against the fence and a raised flower bed that took up about a third of the yard. There was hardly any space for entertaining or relaxing.

On one side, bamboo was growing under the fence. On the other side, ivy curled up the fence.

Bowman knew just what to do. She sent an e-mail to "This Old House," a national PBS show that focuses on complicated renovation projects.

"I sent them an e-mail saying, 'What do we do? How do we get started?' We've watched PBS forever."

Last month, she got an e-mail reply from "Ask This Old House," a spinoff specializing in small projects. The e-mail said that producers were coming to Baltimore, and could she please send them photos of her yard?

That's how the couple came to be standing in a yard full of local landscapers and TV people, many of whom flew into Baltimore from Boston, where the PBS show is based.

The taping will be boiled down to a 10-minute segment of "Ask This Old House," said producer Christopher Wolfe, who was on the scene.

Segment host Roger Cook, a PBS landscaping expert, did several takes in which he tells Bowman and Kopf in his Boston accent, "This fence looks really solid. Now let's work on that yahd."

When the shot was done to Vos' satisfaction, Kopf asked hopefully, "Are we all free now for a second?"

"No," Vos said, "we're not free. There is no freedom."

But there were crabcakes coming later in the day, and truth be told, it wasn't really that much work for the couple.

When the camera was off, a local landscaping crew stepped in to do the real work of digging up the grass and laying fresh sod, clearing out the bed to make way for a seating area, and cutting a hole in the fence around the tree.

If the couple were paying for the work, it would cost about $4,000, said Michael Martin, president of Live Green, a Reisterstown landscaper that PBS hired for the day.

Meanwhile, an announcer for Maryland Public Television was standing in the alley with his own cameraman, taping a local teaser for "Ask This Old House."

"There's still a lot of work to be done, but you'll see how it all turns out when this segment runs sometime this fall. I'm Lou Davis for Maryland Public Television."

Kopf, 29, said that, other than technical aspects he couldn't have imagined, the day was pretty much what he had expected. There was one major difference, though.

"I might have had this many people in my yard once," he said.

"And you supplied the beer," said Cook.

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