19Aug
My Day normally starts with checking to see what garden advice requests have been sent in by our members and viewers overnight and see if anyone needs a follow up email with advice.
Today looks fairly typical with advice being requested an indoor orange plant, assistance with advice on growing flowers for a daughters wedding next spring, how to build a decking frame, saving a 50 year old rose. The orange plant – that’s a compost pH thats gone slightly to alkaline, wedding flowers we have a special service for this, building a decking framework I will need to create a quick drawing of a decking frame for our viewer and the rose this is a rose given as a gift by a lost relative we will recommend taking a bud and growing it on a new rootstock.
After answering the advice requests I am of on my first visit of the day an existing MyGardenTeam client who needs some on site advice about pruning fruit trees, a lot of the work I do with clients is educational so that in the case of pruning they will be able to do it themselves next season if they wish.
Next I am off to see a new MyGardenTeam member on her first advisor visit. She is typical of a lot of our MyGardenTeam plus clients in that she loves gardening but has limited knowledge, but that fine because the MyGardenTeam is designed to back her up completely with support ranging from a quick email or phone call with advice or a couple of day assistance in her garden with a GardenAdvice advisor helping with pruning or other garden projects. She has just signed up for the service so my task today is to carry out the services first visit and help her decide what style of garden she wishes to create and put together a program to help her achieve this using the services online section which includes calendars.
On my way next back home now to spend some time on line with some more of our MyGardenteam clients today from Argentina and China both developing English style gardens in Argentina and China. People often ask is the language difference not a barrier but the reality is people interested in developing and English style garden overseas can often write and speak better English than me !! The real challenge assisting our clients abroad is working out the extremes of weather where they live in the summer and winter so we can come up with a list of plants to use that suits the style of garden they wish to create. I manage to see my clients abroad quite often and I am due to visit China later this year and hopefully I will be able to combine a spot of plant hunting.
The final two tasks for today involve create some advice for a lawn renovation project, I am no lawn expert so I will contact one of the other team of advisors to get some input on this. Plus I have to creating some notes on a wildlife pond we are assisting in creating next week for a new housing development in Cornwall.
I love my job I get loads of great feed back from my client, and I also get a buzz from sharing the gardening projects we help them create. no one day is the same, just when I think things are a bit normal I will get a project from a client that will stretch my knowledge for example helping design an English cottage garden style garden for a new house in Chile.
See what tomorrow brings – looks like rain, which means I will have to find time at the weekend to weed my own garden !!