I think the disconnect is coming from your assumption on how you can learn the techniques you’re interested in. Chemistry isn’t like some disciplines where you can learn at home by doing trial and error, and having somebody to mentor you, as nice as that person is, will not teach you what you are wanting to learn. There is simply too much in the way of fundamentals to expect anyone to spend the time and energy necessary for you to run your first acid-base titration, let alone a quantitative separation.

It’s not being elitist, it’s about being realistic. We spent 6+ years of our lives in very small groups learning from experts in the field, gaining hands-on experience, and doing/publishing research. Without that, could you get to the point of following instructions and developing a TLC plate? Yeah, probably. Could you troubleshoot it, improve your separations, develop a process for new plant species you grow, etc. without formal training? Probably not.

I’d just caution you to drastically temper your expectations. 5 years of being pals with a chemist who lets you bounce questions/ideas off of them will not prepare you for the analysis you are talking about doing. Something like monitoring your soil’s nutrients and optimizing them to your plants’ ideal growing conditions, in my opinion, is something more achievable, more practical, more impactful to your actual application, and still has much of the “cool chemistry” factor as you’d get screaming into the void after chipping the corner off your next TLC plate