Transcript
In my garden, I have a lot of plants that are vining plants. They have long vines, where they shoot off squash and pumpkins or cucumbers, and I train them. I train them to run up a trellis because it's efficient for space or I train them to run a certain direction along cardboard on the gravel, so that they will have plenty of room to grow without getting in the way of each other in sales. It's exactly the same with your buyers.
You see, they have lots of offshoots and lots of different directions that they could go. But if you want to get the most you can from your customers, well, you have to train them. You have to steer them. You have to help them see the right direction. You can't do this in a way that's going to injure them. I couldn't be rough with the vines that come off the pumpkin plants because then I'd snap them and lose them entirely.
But gently and gradually and early on, when they're still malleable, you can shape your customers. You can teach them how to do business with you. And of course, you have to be flexible to meet their needs, too, as I've described in lots of the other videos in the series.
But if you don't do those things and you leave them to their own devices, chances are that they're going to go in a different direction. They're not going to go where you'd like to see them going the place that might be the very best for them.
Start early, pay attention, be available often so that you can help to direct them. And that's going to serve them better than you being hands off or at a distance in a garden.
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.
