Ruthie, you are such an inspiration to all who reed your posts. I admire your spirit. We continue to keep you in our prayers. Today my daughter starts her first radiation treatment for breast cancer. She is so lucky as they found the small tumor on her 1st mammogram. They were able to remove all the cancer with surgery, the radiation is to make sure that no cancer cells escaped. She is only 47, so they are being extra careful.

I would love to go to a lecture on color where the information came from real knowledge & experience, but, sadly, most of the ones that I've had the misfortune to have to sit through have been Crying-Baby-Yellow level: that is, not only was the info basic but much of it was worthlessly anecdotal. The good news about that is that it means that anything above that is a step in the right direction--even if it's a baby step. So my suggestion is not about your subject, since I'm no expert on using color--merely its historical usage--but about how to present material that your audience should know but may not know, without, of course, revealing that you know they don't know it. It gets tricky. No one gets as huffy at the subtle implication that he doesn't know what he's talking about as the guy who really doesn't know what he's talking about. The hyperventilating indignation is always the clue to the poseur. Like Shakespeare says, "The lady doth protest too much." Anyway, if you present your material not as knowledge per se aimed at them, but as an approach that they themselves can use to present it to their clients, things will go fine. That is, you talk as though they already know everything you have to say--and that you know they know (even though they may not)--and that the only thing that your audience lacks--because they're visual, not verbal experts--is the ability to explain important (and sometimes complicated) color concepts & theories in such a simple way that even non-professionals can understand them. It's the decorating version of the old "Doctor-a-friend-of-mine-has-a-problem" approach, except you'll be playing the part of the dcotor, and you'll tell them how to explain color things to their "friends." It's silly but it lets everyone keep his self-respect. I've never had to perform this little charade in regards to color, but I frequently have to do it with groups of architectural students & their professors, who, amazingly enough, often know almost nothing of architectural history. It's actually pretty shocking. Anyway, when I do, I preface the whole thing--and my spiel can be pretty heavy-duty: I once transcribed it and then annotated it with my sources and when I got done it had almost 200 footnotes for an hour talk. I don't dumb it down for anybody--with "for those of you who already know all this"--and here's where I give the profs a smile of affirmation that they are, indeed, much more knowledgeable than I am--"please be patient, since I want to make sure the first-year people have the background here, too." Then I sprinkle what I say with plenty of asides: "You already know that Chicago is built on marshland..." & "Think of the Guggenheim Museum's entry sequence..." & "Now, you probably remember know that Louis Sullivan went to school in Paris..." which, things, unfortunmately, many of them don't know, but they don't want to admit it. This way, however, I provide the information they need to understand what they're seeing, but only on the basis that they're merely being "reminded" of what they already know, not that they're being told something for the first time. And there's another benefit of verbally expressing your assurance that most of your audience already knows your material--even when they don't--it eliminates all the head-bobbing that comes when I mention something that they do know, and they want to make sure everyone in the audience KNOWS that they know it. That drives me crazy. It's like hollerin out "Amen"s in church. At any rate, if you can package your info--whatever it is, and good luck on that--into a format which makes it easy for your audience to pass it along to their clients & employees, then you know they're bound to absorb a lot of it themselves, without ever having to admit that it's the first time that they themselves understood it. Best of all, in the future, they'll look to you as an authority. Ah, the games we're forced to play to avoid damaging anyone's precious self-esteem... Regards, MAGNAVERDE.

Greetings Else (and others) ... ... from another south-western Ontario denizen - in my situation, near London, about half way Detroit/Windsor to Toronto/Buffalo. Hope you enjoy your stay: there's a lot of good talk, friendliness, some useful advice and general good feeling (despite some snarkiness from time to time - which one can choose to ignore, if so inclined). And we value folks who have been lurkers adding their ideas and opinions, rather than just sitting and quietly absorbing. As I went into the bank just now, it was starting to "spit" a bit ... when I came out (another story - see my thread) it was raining. But, as I said to someone just going in ... some of us have been "all wet" (or said to be so) for years. ole joyful

Hi Steve. It really does sound like you are trying to discourage people from growing their own citrus when you say things like: "6b "WAY TO FAR NORTH TO BE GROWING CITRUS" Steve" or "The vast amount of people that grow up north quit after a year or 2 when their trees die." In fact, statements like: " "We" are the small handful of citrus tree growers doing well with few troubles." are completely unfounded. Though I respect your opinion that growing citrus was the hardest experience you've ever had, it certainly wasn't for me. Personally I think that shoot tip micropropagation is complex, but not hard. I think that cultivating mycelium for master cultures is time consuming, but not hard. Basically, I think that all of the things you are saying are hard, are in fact easy with a little knowledge, which is the purpose of offering this guide. I don't think that growing citrus is "expensive, time consuming, and difficult". As a matter of fact as hobbies go, I'd say it can be rather cheap! To be clear that it CAN be rather cheap. If you want to spend a million bucks building a theme-park sized greenhouse then go ahead, but you certainly don't need to. If you want to spend $40 a bag on bark chips for your 5-1-1 mix then you can, but you don't have to. If you want to spend a grand on a fertilizer injector for your irrigation system, again you can but you don't have to. I'm sorry that you feel that this hobby is expensive, but I feel that you can keep you hobby on the very cheap side if you want to. That is to say that I managed to keep everything on the cheap side when tropical plants were not a part of my business and were just a hobby. Just for the sake of clarity, when you say that things are difficult to grow outside of their 'temperature zone', are you considering that every houseplant that you come across is being grown out of it's 'zone'. If what you said were entirely true then I don't think that I could grow the orchids, bromeliads, tree ferns and other wacky things that I do. You could even go so far as to say, that because these species are not native, they don't have anywhere as close to as many naturally occurring pests and therefore are EASIER to grow! I would like to encourage positive discussion, so if anybody would like to start a discussion about this elsewhere, please do. I would however like to hear from people who have something positive to contribute to the production of a citrus care guide, here. Thanks for the imput so far everybody. :)