I guess they still have swelled heads from the days when Gretzky was winning them a boat load of Stanley Cups. 
But seriously, I’ve never been a facebook member and never will be. No great loss I figure.
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Seen exactly the same thing in a few private FB groups. Lots more wrong information than correct information provided by folks with very strong opinions but little knowledge.
We have received some excellent, useful info too from a few highly qualified growers including one published fruit specialist from the PNW and a handful of commercial growers in the Blueberry groups.
Quite a bit of self promotion in some the Elderberry groups and one of the Berry groups.
Many folks with very strong anti-chemical opinions in a group for commercial Elderberry growers which I thought was strange but one knowledgeable person replied with the exact info I needed - paint the leaves and trunk with TRICLOPYR
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Big corporations are smart and know how to maximize profit by sorting things a certain way. If you look at a grocery store they tend to attract you with fresh cookies and what not when you walk in then they have the fresh fruit and veggies on one side and dairy products on the other forcing you to walk on both sides of the store as they know those are 2 things on most people’s list. With Home Depot if I want to get fertilizer I enter the garden area and see all the potential plants I could have then I enter the area where I see the tools to make gardening easier and then I see the pesticides/weed killers and then I see the fertilizer. By then they hope you came in looking for fertilizer and your cart is now full. With social media you are expected to browse and read posts and just get lost in them and before you know it hours have gone by. Heck I have browsed nursery websites for certain fruit trees and ended up picking something else up because it sounded interesting.
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“Don’t you have any more in back?”
Price and availability are top-of-mind concerns for both big-box shoppers and eCommerce shoppers. Both kinds of merchants do their utmost to obscure this information because it is to their advantage not to compete on those terms.
In the case of eCommerce merchants — particularly eCommerce sites of major discount retailers — there is the risk of arbitrage. If they offer a price that’s “too attractive,” the scalpers swoop in, soak up all the available inventory at the going retail price (denying “real customers” the opportunity to buy the “loss leaders”), apply yet another layer of markup over retail, and still manage to move product at a profit to themselves. Merchants’ obscuring their pricing and availability makes the scalpers’ job harder — as does obscuring product identification concerning make and model.
Obscuring price and availability makes their eCommerce sites “stickier,” too.
Perhaps something like eCommerce stickiness is a goal for brick-and-mortar retail architects and merchandisers as well. They want you to spend time locating the product, touch many things, feel them, pick them up, and put them down without telling you what substitute products are available or giving you much of a grasp of what any of it is really worth.
Just try to remember when was the last time you saw a diagram of the back of an electronic device printed on the carton or even a list of the box contents. The marketroid types don’t dare give you an excuse not to buy something.
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I would say unless people can recognize the advise is poor, they can’t be helped efficiently. They need to see that the place they getting advise is not a right place and start searching for a better one. Our forum is coming pretty high in google search when you look for some answer, so if they dedicated to get answers, they will find us by searching for the answer. If not - I don’t think they will even benefit from using this forum…
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They average the more time you are in the store the more time you have to break down and buy some extra items. I think the average time for someone to break down and buy extra is something like 40 minutes so they want to keep you there for at least 40 minutes feeling and looking at the items. Even carts and how big the store is designed to make you buy more. I remember I bought a Christmas tree that was 7 feet from Home Depot. It looked small by design in the store but once I got home it took up the entire room and went to the ceiling leaving no space for a topper. They hope they buy up for that design and never return it. The colors change depending on buying practices too. Red they want you to buy more while blue they want you to be more relaxed buying like Walmart against Target buying experience. When I worked at Home Depot they would not even show us their bulk pricing allotments per item because they were worried about competition. Scalpers will get their way no matter what though. I remember with the NES they came out with a NES that was supposed to play a few games of the NES lineup but people figured out how to hack it so they could play the entire game lineup of the NES. Scalpers bought so many that many people could not buy it before Nintendo chose to discontinue it. I think we have all heard of the Ticketmaster debacles as of late. There is supposed to be laws against scalping but no one really enforces it. It is a thing where the law enforcement people are like please report it to us with a PR stunt whenever it comes up and the scalpers are more honest and just say yeah they are not going to do jack to us. I think 60 minutes did an episode on it and that was exactly how it went. The boxes state specs and what is in there but no one reads what it actually is. Many cereals in the USA list ingredients that cause cancer but no one understands that reading the box. My laptop lists the processor and all these other builds on the product listing but unless you are a IT person or build your own computers you don’t know what any of that does or means. The issues I have seen with big box stores is not them not declaring price on their websites but the factor of them not having what they claim to have and it takes just as long to get it as getting it myself. I went to buy fertilizer from Home Depot this year and they claimed they had 12 on their website but when I got there they had just 2 on the shelves. 3 years ago I tried buying a power tool and the power tool had pretty much every store calling me stating they were just going to refund me because they could not find it in store. If I go to Home Depot I can see what aisle it is in and what bay it is in so I can walk in and purchase it myself by the time I wait at customer service and have them get it.
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@DeKay how do you know it is a good FB group if you have never been there? I know there are several individuals there that I respect, but I have never seen it either. I am from the wild rose province so I would be let in. @tbg9b I am with you I have never been a FB member either. But this one hurts. Do you think they’ll let me in using my wife’s account? I want to say I love this site. Unfortunately not every one in Alberta(I miss when far north forum was active) sees it that way.
As far as bringing people here from FB, why not? I believe that the structure is in place here to assure the forum doesn’t devolve into either a trolish battleground or a frothy site of misleading anecdotes about managing fruit trees.
But the real question is does Scott want this forum to grow a lot? Do the administrators want to deal with more flags.
Cliff England just posted this morning in American Berry Growers group on FB asking for advice on how to grow blackberries, raspberries, goumi, bush cherries, and aronia.
He will likely get many wrong answers and many right answers…which is what most all of those groups do… How will he know with so many differing answers?
I feel as if this group is better for leading to a consensus…whereas FB is more like a boiler room of folks that will give expert answers on growing things that they have never even grown themselves and likely never will.
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My vote would be that it’s best to grow organically.
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@chinook An assumption on my part given that there are, as you say, some respected individuals in that group.
At least we could ask Cliff England to check us out. I’m pretty sure he’s not a trouble maker.
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Hes been a member here for 8 years.
I get it though… i asked a question a couple of weeks ago if it was best to plant blueberries in the spring or fall and got no response… i know there are blueberry guys on here with experience and knowledge…but due to politics of some folks that probably dont like me i wont get an answer.
I could have posted the same question on FB and got 50 answers in an hour.
I ended up googling it instead…
I think anyone who is serious about fruit growing would likely find us on their own.
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I didn’t see your question or I would have told you that all things being equal fall is a bit better. If it is container plants it is pretty much always the sooner the better (if the soil isn’t frozen), as long as you don’t let them dry out. Obviously, that is more likely to happen if the weather is warm and plants are in full leaf.
I always answer questions if I think I have a good one, even if someone has been outright insulting to me. I’m not passionate enough about on-line conflicts to hold a grudge, but also, questions that one person asks might be useful to others on this forum. Knowledge about fruit plants is one of the few topics for which I have something useful to share, after over a half century of mostly full time experience with them and other plants.
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My local (N AL) group is alright- get answers to my dumb queries (does this grow here? - yes, or no answer which I take to mean no it doesn’t/ noone tried it yet). However the frequency of “I’m brand new and x y z ?” question that any garden book or online guide or even seed catalog would teach about is disheartening, and usually brings out moderators having to say ‘remember to be kind!!!’ Also the nonorganic queries and answers- photo of lovely plant leaves with a bug or hole or two and “what do I do OMG disaster” answered by “XY or Z chemical!” when the plant looks better than my healthy producing plants…
My other guilty thought is everyone asks where can they get cheap bulk compost and I refuse to disclose my secret source.
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My Facebook admin of Colorado Gardening has posts of the group stating that she will permanently mute members if they are not being nice or mentioning things like being mean to out of state people who just moved in. Here in CO there is a keen hatred from natives of CO with people moving in from other states because many people are being priced out of many areas. Because of that and the posts of I am new to CO posts she had to just mute people. She also had to mute people talking about animal harm like trapping or killing. As I said above she controls and approves all posts. A lot on the Facebook group I am in has to do with showing off now. It used to be a lot of learning. Maybe I just learned everything I had to learn from them? IDK. It is not a permaculture board so there is always more people stating things like flowers or seed crops as that is what most people are thinking and acting on every year. Waiting 5 years for fruit sounds like a nightmare to most people despite it’s potential to give more and longer.
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The world largest garbage dump.
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I was actually able to network with someone and put through a trade for some obscure varieties a couple years back on one of the FB groups. You have to be observant and discerning about it.
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I’m a member of a few excellent Fakebook fruit growing groups, which have lots of participation from experienced people. Some others are pretty weak. A lot depends on who’s running it and how it’s moderated. I prefer a forum like this, but have also found value there, especially when it comes that are regional or specialize in obscure areas of knowledge.
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