Tom Fochtman’s been keeping busy since retiring from CoCal Landscapes. He sends this report from an expedition out west:

This was a really nice fish and way bigger than the pic depicts. Hit like a freight train and headed upstream, then downstream and we had to chase him in the raft.  About 22 inches and 4 pounds. We floated 10 miles of the Colorado River, from Glenwood Springs to New Castle.

But we’re keeping him busy, too. He’s writing a quarterly column on mergers and acquisitions, and the business of selling your business for us. You can read his first installment here, and look for his next piece in our November issue.

We’re putting on a can’t-miss webinar tomorrow with our resident sales expert and columnist Marty Grunder.

It starts at 12:30 EDT tomorrow, and you can register here.

Yes, it costs $69.99. But you’ll get invaluable insight and proven sales strategies that you can implement in your business tomorrow, including:

• How to screen each and every prospect to make sure you are meeting with prospect who will buy.
• What you must do before each and every call to improve your chances for making a sale by 50%.
• Why your price doesn’t matter if you do 3 simple things.

Plus, you’ll get a  sneak preview of the L&L State of the Industry research on revenue and profits from me.

If you can’t make it tomorrow afternoon, you can still register to get access the recorded version later on.

So, if you want to increase your sales this fall and in 2013, you owe it to yourself to spend an hour with us tomorrow. You’ll be glad you did.

What software do you use to route your trucks?

How much do you charge customers for turf maintenance?

Which marketing works best?

At the L&L Linkedin group, 3,300 landscape contractors, lawn care operators and other green industry professionals ask questions of their  colleagues and learn their best practices.

Check it out today!

We’re happy to report that we’ve launched a new podcast series – The Lawn Care Radio Network – to help make your windshield time more productive.

It’s designed to bring you the same business insight and industry information you expect from L&L, but in a more portable format. You can subscribe in iTunes or listen on our website.

The series, which we’ll update throughout the month, is brought to you by Valent Professional Products, Agrium Advanced Technologies and Exmark.

So check it out, take a listen and let us know what you think!

Later this week, I’ll be on Chris Heiler’s new podcast, the GetSocial Radio Show.

We’ll be talking about the trends in the industry, some of my favorite stories from the past few years and our latest Top 100 Report that comes out this month.

We get started at 8 p.m. EST Thursday. You can listen live on Chris’ site, or subscribe in iTunes.

Hope to see you there! Tell your friends!

I got to do one of my favorite things as editor at L&L today.

When we run surveys, we typically offer an incentive – we’ve given away iPads, digital cameras and a trip to Hawaii. But we run a lot of surveys,  so we often use gift cards. So every few weeks I walk down to the bank near our office and pick up a few Visa gift cards.

We just finished up another research project, this one about lawn care product use, and I got to pick up cards at $75 a pop for 10 random respondents.

They are:

• Michael Rush, Rush Lawn Care, Searcy, Ark.
• Ricki Linyard, Lawn Doctor, Olive Branch, Miss.
• Mark Landa, Boulevard Flower Gardens, South Chesterfield, Va.
• Erv Denig, Lawn & Turf Landscaping, Ft. Wayne, Ind.
• Robb Bashaw, Rancho del Escudo, Waller, Texas
• Chris Senske, Senske Lawn & Tree Care, Kennewick,Wash.
• Rick Lisanti, Growing Concern, Monroe Township, N.J.
• Craig Pickett, J.H. Plantscapes, Cypress, Texas
• Rafael Rico, Hometown Pest Control, Delray Beach, Fla.
• Mark Ruppert, Ruppert & Company Property Services, Bloomfield, Conn.

So, congratulations to our winners. Your cards are on their way. And to everyone else out there, thank you for taking the time to fill out our surveys. We know you’re busy, and your responses really help us as we put together the magazine each month.

Monday is the deadline to get your applications in for our 2012 scholarships. We’re offering two cash awards at $5,000 each to promising horticulture and landscape students.

You can download the application here: bit.ly/hort_scholarship.

Good luck!

About half of our team is on the road this week, covering the California Spring Trials. Two teams of editors and videographers are headed south down Pacific Coast Highway in California, reporting on the latest and greatest plant introductions from major breeders and suppliers.

For the next seven days, they’ll have the newest plant varieties for landscapes, garden centers and home gardens, and breaking news from the world of plants.

You’ll find daily coverage at our main site, and can sign up for our daily enewsletter here. You can also get up-to-the-minute dispatches on Twitter by following Greenhouse Management magazine at @greenhousemag, GM Editor Kristy O’Hara at @GMmagEditor, our new consumer-focused app A Garden Life at @agardenlife and the hashtag #springtrials.

In Candide, Voltaire counseled us to cultivate our own garden. He meant that we had to pursue physical labor, but also that we must constantly seek out new experiences and information to keep ourselves mentally fit.

In an effort to help more people do that, our parent company, GIE Media, has just announced the release of its first-ever consumer app, A Garden Life.

AGL is the brainchild of our founder and chairman, Richard Foster. He spells out the mission like this:

To create a community of consumers with shared values and interests in lifestyle subject areas such as healthy living, that includes growing and preparing clean food, contributing to community, exploring travel and adventure, art and literature, as well as having a passion for diverse aspects of nature and gardening.

We’ll publish six issues of A Garden Life this year, exclusively via iOS and Android tablets and online.

If you like the idea but don’t have a tablet yet, you can read more at the AGL website. We’re on Twitter, too

You can get the premiere issue right now on iTunes and in the Android Market. Check it out, tell your friends and let us know what you think.

(And, if in addition to running a landscape business you also like to write about gardening, send a few pitches to AGL editor Heather Tunstall.)

The flow of scholarship applications is starting to increase here at the Lawn & Landscape world headquarters.

This is a reminder to let the horticulture and landscape students in your life know that they can net five large if they win.

Download the application here.

Also: Design students have the best handwriting.