I've been following the "Make a Desert Environment" tutorial by novocaine, it's rather nice, but my first plant simply won't do what his does. 
Could someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Or is it this version of Blender? I'm in 4.3, so I might be missing something. I just don't know.
I've lost count as to how many times I redid this tutorial, but I decided to just put the one "dead schrub" on the plane and it worked just fine. I guess there's a first time for everything. I'd still like to know what I was doing wrong, cause I'd like to avoid that thing from now on. thanks
Hi Jimi,
The only way to figure out what you did wrong, would be, to start over from scratch (yes, again!), carefully following along with the Tutorial, you probably have made a mistake, somewhere along the line.
Now, as the plants seem to be made with Blender's Particle System (that hasn't changed in years), the Blender Version won't make much of a difference.
The comments around YouTube training always sound like that. Perhaps it's more about the guy or gal that is teaching, they might be doing a bad job at it? Just making an uninformed guess really, the channel might be a good one, it's just that you get to a point of frustration and it may not be your fault. And people who come to CG Cookie always say that following tutorials here is so different than watching YouTube, the quality is far superior. So all that to say, that since you've tried it so much, perhaps it's the content that has something wrong in it.