Transcript:
The best managers that I've run across in my career are the ones who had some management training early on, shortly after they first started supervising. It's really difficult for people who have been managing a long time to unlearn and to break bad habits and to become different kinds of managers when all of that baggage that they've accumulated is weighing them down.
The same could probably be said about any type of job role. The people who are going to do the best, are the ones who received training early on.
It's true in the garden, too, when I want my plants, the vining ones, for example, to do well, I begin training them early on. I train them to go a certain direction from the very first moment that they start shooting off those vines. People need direction. They want direction. They want feedback.
For example, it's a terrible thing to do to someone, to watch them make the same mistake over and over and over again and not to correct them until your level of frustration becomes out of control and they're wondering why you didn't say something sooner. They might even be horrified that everyone knows they've been making that mistake consistently.
It's not kind. It's not helpful. It's not useful to spare someone's feelings, but allow them to keep making mistakes. It's much better to give them feedback and to care enough about them, to give them early instruction so that they can do their very best at the soonest time possible. The longer you wait, the less likely it is that you'll be able to redirect them and that's a terrible thing to see happen, to see someone's potential compromised because you were unwilling to help them out.
You have a lot of control about which direction the plants will grow or about how bushy they'll become. These affect the yields with tomato plants, for example. You want to be sure that you aren't allowing so much growth that the plant itself can't sustain itself as well to get a lot of fruit production, a lot of tomatoes from the tomato plant. You want to snap off any of the branches that are dying on the vine. You want to be sure that you are not allowing the plants to grow horizontally so much that they start to interfere with each other and shade each other.
You want them to grow up and you want them to yield a lot of fruit. So you just direct them gently as they're growing. You don't wait until it's too late when breaking off a stem would be detrimental to the plant. You do that early on by thinking about the direction you want them to go.
This is especially true with any sort of plant that vines: cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, not tomatoes, but pumpkins is what I meant to say there. I grow a lot of of these plants, these vining plants, because I have the room for it and I like to train them to grow up instead of out, which means that for certain plants like cantaloupe, I have to give them little supports because we don't want the fruit to get so heavy that it snaps the vine.
There are some, like the great big pumpkins that I allowed it to vine out across the gravel in the garden. I plant those in a place where I know they'll have plenty of space to do that. But even with those, I direct them so that they're growing the direction I want them to, the direction where the cardboard has been laid out for them. So the gravel doesn't dent the soft skins when it first grows. When you're training the plants that vine, training them a certain direction, you have to redirect them.
They're going to try to grow every which way. But with the supports that you give them and with the ways that you help them attach their parts of the vine that shoot out and cling to the structures you give them, you're helping them to go into the places where they can be safest and have the most support and do the best over the long term. And when you do that, you get the very best results possible. You get great big pumpkins and more of them.
For example, you get more ornamental gourd and squashes. You'll have to look at another video to see those.
You get bigger, you get better, and you get more when you take the time to do some training throughout the life of the products in your garden.
