Good advice? Wrong Season : Wrong Hemisphere!

Since our return from South Africa in late 2002, we have maintained a writing relationship with many of the people we met there. Some, like us, have since returned to their places of Birth. So we now have friends in America, Canada, Germany, England, Scotland, & India as well as Swaziland and South Africa itself. We also have a Church friend in Mexico who we correspond with too. Every Christmas we sent out a general Christmas letter and to a few very close friends, we post over an Aussie Callander for the following year. Occasionally we get one back. The year before it was one from South Africa. Last year it was from England.

It was /is a very lovely garden one with gardening advice on the bottom of each monthly page. It is very lovely, unfortunately I had already bought and hung up in my Office an Inspirational Callander. So in wondering where to put this new one where we would get some enjoyment from it, I came up with the next most obvious place. Yep. You guessed it! The Toilet! So it now has pride of place in there and observed on quite a regular basis by a variety of people.

I myself am a keen if somewhat erratic gardener. It is a long story that I won’t go into here, but my wife and myself are actually living with our three children in their house, and not the other way around like most. Anyway, as part of my responsibilities for staying here, I am responsible for maintaining the Garden, although the oldest often helps out.

So it was no surprise when one day she said dad, “One day when you have nothing better to do, provided the ground is not frozen over you can plant root wrapped roses now.”

Now my first born has a rather dry, if somewhat direct sense of humour and as we were in the middle of a mighty hot heat wave at the time, I thought she was being sarcastic about the heat, with her comment about the ground being frozen over. Also she knows full well, that roses are not my favourite plant. (Oh yes I love the flowers. It is just the prickly plant that I detest and literally shed blood over.)

However it was only when she mentioned “root wrapped plants” that I started to wonder where you would get Root wrapped (Bare rooted) plants at this time of the year.

It was then that the penny dropped and I realized that she was reading from the bottom of the English calendar’s gardening advice for January.

So you see she was not being sarcastic, or trying to be funny, (although she did know what she was doing in regard to the different climes.) she was simply passing on what was before her eyes. In truth, there was nothing wrong with the advice being offered; if you were in the Northern Hemisphere where our mid summer is their mid winter. Yes the advice was good for them but irrelevant and totally wrong for me/us.

What about you? Do you blindly follow and try everything you read or hear without checking if the source is relevant to you and your particular situation.

In this case although I would not have been able to buy any “root wrapped” roses, I could plant them from a container into the garden if I so wished and had the water to keep it alive until its roots had time to provide for itself. So the advice would not have been entirely inappropriate this time.

However sometimes we can get ourselves into big trouble and cost ourselves big money simply because we have accepted the wrong advice. Sometimes this advice will really be wrong but often it is not so much wrong in itself but rather in its application, or place of application, like trying to grow plants in Australia, using any Northern Hemisphere advice, whether it be English or American.

I am not knocking these countries or their advice, simply warning that usually it has to be adapted and accommodated to our own unique environment.

You will be amazed at the number of gardening advice books available in Australia, written for Northern Hemisphere conditions, whether their source is England or America. When you obtain these books you can keep the seasonal advice but must swap the months around, so that January is Mid Summer here and not mid winter, otherwise you will be doing every thing right just at the totally wrong time.

What about with you? Are you doing the right thing but at the wrong time? Do you not only need to re-read the instructions, but check the place of origin for this advice?

Remember, there really is little truly wrong advice around, just inappropriate or unseasonably. With advice there really is no such thing as “One size fits all” when it comes to the correct advice for you. Every situation needs to be evaluated, as does the available advice long before any actions are implicated.

Again when it comes to advice, are you passing on appropriate advice, or simply passing on something you have heard with out checking the source or relevance of such advice? Catch you later: Walter