In article kEn8b.422$AD1.11@pd7tw2no, "Phrederik"
wrote:

Can anyone suggest some simple questions to ask at a garden center to really
see if the person you are talking to knows what they are doing?

I'm tired of asking questions and getting the answer that helps make the
biggest sale.

I also don't want to nag all of you with all of my questions, especially
when the answers would be more relevant for my yard when asked locally.

Thanks!

I have an earlier edition beat-up copy of the Sunset Guide in the car so
that I can check for myself if something I've never seen before is apt to
do well in this zone in my yard's conditions. I even so often neglect to
check it, & that's when I end up with a "perennial" that is only perennial
in the deep south, or which is notorious for not transplanting well &
should've been grown from seed, or some other problem NEVER on tags or
salesmens' lips, but usually noted in the Sunset Guide for quick
reference. Many & all better garden centers will hand you the guide if you
ask, having several copies behind a counter just for people who want to
check for more info before each purchase.

For other garden care matters, owning & reading through a couple of
general gardening guides will probably put you in the same category of
knowledge as the greater majority of nursery retailers. But even if you
encountered someone very knowledgeable who didn't just give the
sales-pitch answers, there are often a dozen possible answers to any
poser. You have to know what you are hoping to achieve in your personal
gardens & by what methods you'd prefer, to what degree you're committed to
being organic, what conditions you cannot provide at all & which are
rather natural to the spaces you have to plant in -- stuff only you can
know & without which, most quicky-answers will be less than complete.

If you ask "what's a good fertilizer for such-&-such?" the answer will
always have to be something off the shelf that they have for sale. It's
not that they're not misleading you, but there were probably five other
options, many of them superior to that bag of fertilizer they sold you.
If you'd asked, "Which is the best fertilizer for my fern garden" the best
answer could well be "None at all, stick to leaf mold," but the vendor
either won't know that & so will sell you a perennial fertilizer, or they
will kind of know it but figure it's your business if you want to
fertilize stuff that'll be damaged by fertilizer, & it's the vendor's job
to get that extra ten dollars out of you, not tell you to stop buying
stuff you don't need from his company. It's nice when they do, but what
are the chances. You have to be realistic in expectation, & come to the
table with a modicum of knowledge of your own.

Even the best most knowledgeable & fully honest retailer doesn't have the
time to fill you in on all your options -- if you paid to attend a weekend
workshop you might have only an introductory idea of a topic.

If the retailer needs to sell lots of the gardening chemicals his or her
company is offering, you'll NEVER get the best organic answer unless they
also have a lot of off-the-shelf products marketed as "organic" -- & the
"organic gardening" section of most garden centers includes some the
biggest scam-artist nonsense of all time, besides some stuff that although
indeed organic is toxic as all hell. It's not the vendor's duty to educate
you for free; it's his duty to sell you stuff that is for sale, with as
few discouraging remarks as possible, & if you've asked point blank for
Diatomaceous Earth to use as an organic fertilizer, & they have it, how
could anyone expect the vendor to tell you you don't want to use that
stuff, it kills beneficial insects & is like putting crushed glass in your
garden. If the public wants it & requests it, even asking point-blank "Is
it totally safe?" is going to get you a "Yes" since any honest answer
would mean never selling any of it at all to anyone ever. They won't stay
in business by being TOO knowledgeable. But telling you some tepidly
fertilizing dung-water aerated by $500 worth of equipment will keep
pathogens out of your garden -- now THAT's something that is easy for
vendors to get behind & promote & convince even themselves it's real.

I think you should expect at minimum (though often even then not receive)
an honest answer about plants being offered for sale. "Will this live in
my soggy bog garden" should get you an answer that is true, in most cases
"No, it needs well draining soil." But beyond those basics, if you're
asking larger garden management questions, the answer CAN'T be complete, &
the sales-pitch answer is really the best one you can expect. If it's
TOTALLY wrong, even just a standard tag or package label should reveal
that. For most things that are super-simple or which do not provided
vendors financial rewards for misleading you, the quick answer might be a
good one, though often a vendor doesn't want to admit they're a
know-nothing & will trump up a quick answer even when they don't know. So
in all cases, you really have to look it up whether in a good basic
gardening book, on-line, or in this newsgroup. If you ask someone at
Nursery Tersery, Inc., for quick advice that you end up following
rigorously until everything's dead from the bad advice, who'se really at
fault there.

Of course, when you meet someone cool who works at a nursery & who has
some of the same gardening obsessions as yourself, then you could end up
trading advice & learning from each other. I love shade plants which are
NOT every nursery's strong point, & when I meet some shade-plant-obsessed
weirdo working in a nursery, I can connect immediately, & find out about
plants they've had good luck with in their own gardens that I had no
expeience with & am glad to learn about, or informed of small growers who
don't advertise that I have to go visit, & so on. If I expected everyone
else even at that same company to know all that stuff, I'd be in a
continous state of disappointment.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/