Good Advice...where can I get some ?

Most people think that if you went to a large Hardware store rhyming with "Lemmings" - you would get some good advice.

In some cases you might - but how do you recognise it ?

Really this is a conundrum because staff can come across as really confident as they've been repeating the same answers to there customers queries for a long time, so they can sound quite knowledgeable.

I'm going to give you a couple of examples that might highlight what I'm talking about and the difficulty in finding genuinely good advice.

 For sometime now I have been renovating a place in the weekends (which is nearly finished) so I decided to build a fence.There I was happily digging fence post holes when of-course by the innate laws of renovating, I burst the mains water pipe. Naturally this is the pipe that also supplies the 2 units behind ours so I've turned the water off, informed the neighbours and gone off to the plumbing store.

Whilst at the plumbing store (a nationwide chain) I have explained to the chap behind the counter my problem and he has preceded to advise me to buy a joiner. Of Course a joiner, "great advise", couldn't be simpler. What a load of crap this advice turns out to be - having gone back i receive another part which i am suppose to use to fix my plumbing nightmare. 4 visits to the store later - I still have have a damaged mains water pipe.

Anyway the problem was fixed when i went to a different store and got the CORRECT ADVICE on how to fix my ruptured pipes - 5 hours later !!!

Who would have thought the customer service guy in the above example did not have a clue what he was talking about. Im sure that he even believed his own advice BECAUSE  (my point I wish to share is coming)
he had never actually followed his own advice, to repair a burst water main.
If he had, he would have known that his supposedly helpful advice cannot work. He was incapable of fixing my specific problem, although he worked in a store that sold the parts to fix it because he had no experience.

Lets get back to the reason i started writing this blog.

A customer just came in and said I've just been to "Lemmings",  they've said I need a large pot for my Yucca which i'm going to have in my office.

So I start to dig a little further...
Q: will the plant be near natural light in you office.
A: no

Q: what were you after.
A: something low maintenance that will survive indoors.

A couple more questions I knew from EXPERIENCE that he had been advised incorrectly for his requirements..

We recommended that he purchase a Raphis Palm and come back and see us for the pot.

Buying an Indoor plant should be simple - but only if you get good advice.

The normal chain of events,  should he have listened to "Lemmings" would be that he buys an inappropriate plant, it would have died because it was not the right product (for his particular requirements) and he would have wasted his money.

I don't like to waste my money or others to do the same - that is why we always strive to offer the correct advice, learnt through our own gardening and design experience's.

Good knowledgeable advice is hard to come by.

Happy gardening