Well, days dragged on into next year - time flies when you're going senile. With our heavy travel schedule, we had a lot to catch up on, plus Christmas... Haven't even been able to get the ACRES photos up on our blog, yet - but will post the link here after I get the material to our webswami - hopefully, next week.
In the meantime, ACRES was a blast, as it always is. Even got to meet Dr. Don Huber when he visited our booth. For us, it is a chance to meet old friends again, make new friends and meet clients that we had previously only talked to on the telephone or corresponded with. We drank all the Amish raw milk we could hold and had excellent meals within close walking distance of the hotel. There are at least two things about ACRES that are different from nearly all the other shows and conferences we do: Everyone is there to have a good time. Everyone is there to share mutual interests. We even had very congenial chats with our so-called "competitor" labs (uhhh, couldn't get them to buy any drinks, though...). Uhhh, the real action is at the bar, afterwards, by the way...
I mentioned that we're doing a tree paper. It started off as a cleanup of a two-page paper the lab has had available for years. After I got into it, I realized that there was a lot of essential elemental stuff not being mentioned and things that needed to be re-written. Got together with the original principal contributor, G. Sandy Rose, ASCA - one of the most knowlgeable, practical Master Arborists in the country to assist in the new edition. It is styled, "General Planting And Root Care Guide - 1" and runs six pages. Am awaiting Sandy's approval on the final draft and hope to have it available on our webcyte next week.
Meanwhile, Sandy sent so many dramatic photographs of what-not-to-do and disasters plus "how-to" drawings, that I'm now working on Section 2. From the middle of this month to the end of February will be pretty intense for us, so am not sure how soon we can get this one out - but we'll see... Can see the trees paper as maybe four installments/sections. We have to break it up to keep the file sizes down to reasonable proportions. They will all be downloadable, free pdf's from our webcyte (can't put 'em up here, too - for Internet reasons)...
These will be practical, how-to papers so that you can sucessfully plant trees and have them do well over the long haul. But also, a lot of the wrong things to do. You'll be able to instantly spot a bad installation and why it is so. After I got into this, I started paying particular attention to how trees were planted. It has gotten so obsessive, that while at a client's plant yesterday, I took pictures to be included in Section 2 as an excellent example of a classic mistake made by the landscape contractor (hint: "Volcano Mulching").
I'll be back...
