House-Calls No More

November 7th, 2017

   After 18 years of yard brainstorming and more than 1,000 home-garden plans, I’m hanging up the measuring tape.

My measuring days are over.

   This fall is my last for Garden House-Calls, a service I started in 1999 to help do-it-yourselfers with landscape ideas, trouble-shooting, plant suggestions and designs.

   I’ve found I’m getting a little old to crawl under bushes taking measurements and getting soaked in 40-degree rains. Plus, I could use a saner schedule to devote time to writing, talks and garden trips.

   Although I won’t be doing any more home consults, I plan to continue to offer scale drawings to people who send or email me the needed information.

   I’ve done several of these in the last few years, and they’ve worked out well. That option streamlines the process for me and lowers the cost for clients, since people pay only for my drawing time.

   Over the years, about half of the people I’ve helped mainly wanted drawings anyway. The rest were looking for on-site ideas, bug and disease diagnosis, names of best plants for specific spots, and answers to their particular garden questions.

   If you’re in the drawing-only camp, I might still be able to help – if you’re willing to take over the front end.

   That involves getting your own detailed measurements of the area to be drawn, sending me photos, and filling out a questionnaire that helps me determine the kind of look and the kind of plants you’re going to like.

   Details on how to do that are on my updated Garden Drawings page.

   Although it’s a little late to plant this year, this IS a good time to get me your measurements. I should be able to turn around your drawing in a week or two so you’ll be ready to hit the ground planting first thing in spring.

   Garden House-Calling, I hope, helped a lot of people avoid killing plants and encouraged them to plant nicer gardens than if they had winged it on their own.

   After all, gardening isn’t easy. It’s also a topic that most people don’t know a whole lot about, making it easy to go astray – or to opt for the same boring, yew-and-barberry landscapes that so many homes have.

   It was obvious to me that people needed – and wanted – help.

   When I left full-time newspaper work for The Patriot-News in 1997, my new job was as the “information guy” at Country Market Nursery. Some people would spend an hour at the booth, peppering me with one question after another.

   A few of them began asking if I went to people’s homes and told me they had a “whole yard full of questions” and were willing to pay for an on-site consult.

   That happened enough times that in 1999, I earmarked one day each week for “Garden House-Calls.”

   The service grew so fast – even without advertising – that I was soon spending half or more of my time doing consults and drawings.

   That turned out to be more exhausting than you might think. I’ve been outside in subzero wind storms, deluged by tropical storms, stung by swarms of hornets, and bloodied by nails sticking out of fences.

   True to Murphy’s Law, most of the days I scheduled for outside Garden House-Calls turned out to be the worst weather days, while my scheduled writing days are usually the nicest.

   Early on, I tried rescheduling when bad forecasts popped up the day before a home visit. But what usually happened is that the bad weather didn’t materialize, then did show up when I rescheduled for a forecasted nice day.

   Eventually, I learned that it made most sense to just plow through whatever weather I got whenever it decided to show up.

   My “retirement” from House-Calls should solve that and result in a less exhausted George – and one who can devote more time to the grandkids. Now I’ll just have to remember to keep the windows closed by the drawing table…