a video to better understand what suckers are and the structure and what pruning can do.

the leaves on the ground are all the trimmings , I have no branches for over a foot from the ground.

it is about time I empty my compost bins , I will get some more around the tomatoes.

when I plant my tomato starts I plant them in about an 8 inch hole all the way to the first branches , then I place news paper or this year 1/2 a brown paper bag with a x cut in it down over the plant to keep weed growth down and splash up form being an issue. then I put the cage down to hold the paper to the ground. this way I also know when I run out of cages I need to stop planting tomatoes I have 24 tomato plants this year a mix of different varieties some WI55, early girl, grape tomato, celebrity, better boy, and roma 4 of each. I didn't do my own starts this year there is a farm with a green house near by , I just bough them there along with my 16 pepper plants.

the only thing I started this year was Zucchini seems half the country was siting around doing nothing and I was getting overtime.

Yes I have pruned my tomatoes for years. Those lower branches are nothing but a leach on the plant. My process is to have no limbs below the lowest hanging fruit.

Depends.... If the mill has determinate or indeterminate varieties. If they're determinate I'll pinch off a sucker here and there. If they're indeterminate I'll be a bit more careful and get them babies tall and producing. One year we had a very late frost and had them producing from the end of July through late October. Had tomatoes coming out of our ears. My boss (garden was next to the shop) was really impressed which really meant something to me as a city boy coming from an old school farmer.

Good video.

Never have

Good video x2

Remember the 10 degree rule. For those that have not conformed 50F. The tomato's sugar do not change over from sunlight chlorophyll A to chlorophyll B and convert to sugar at night if the temp goes below 10*C. ( I hated learning the Creb sugar/ sucrose cycle pathway)So your green tomato does not turn red as fast.( that's why you wrap your greens when you take them inside, eventually the cycle is complete in the dark)
Some of my pruning has been at ground level this year.......till the cutworm was found. Luckily they were planted 6 inches deep and brushing aside, the stalks have sprouted.

Funny how a plant with so much toxin in it's leaves can be eaten by deer......those dropping are going to be fluid somewhere, with someone with a sour tummy.

This is a sweet 100 grape tomato , I may have to get some stakes and stake this one higher as it grows , I haven't grown this indeterminate grape tomato before but I hear it can get around 9 feet and nearly back to the ground in a season with fruit clusters holding as much as a hundred fruit to the cluster.

GreenCountyPete, I like the paper bag idea. I need to remember that next year!

I just pruned mine now I wish I got before and after pics. Mine were real thick and bushy. There are three problems I try to solve by pruning.

1.) Have nothing but stem showing under the plant and keep all branches and leaves away from the ground. The dirt and debris near the ground creates sickness and bug issues.

2.) Thin the plant out so air can circulate through the plant. Tomato plants hate being wet damp. So when the wind blows you want it to blow through the plant and not have tight wet areas with no airflow. This helps keep them dry. When you water never water the green plant. Water the roots and don't splash the dirt onto the plant. Only water once a week. If you stick to a strict schedule and amount they really like that. 3 gallons every 7 days for example. Its best to use water from buckets that are the temp of the day and not ice cold water from the hose. I'm lazy and used cold water from the hose. (Spacing the plants out is key. I suggest the next closest plant to be a full shovel length away.)

3.) By having less growth branches, leaves, and etc... the plant can focus its energy on the the branches, leaves, and tomatos that you leave behind and should provide larger better fruit.

When you prune dispose of the clippings. Leaving them lay around near the plant also encourages disease and bugs.

Someone was asking about my plants at work saying well I don't do that or this and mine grow fine. I liked my reply. "Anyone can grow a tomato plant and get tomatos. I'm sure you do fine. With my tomaoto plants I try to have the first tomato of the season in my area, the tastiest tomato around, and the last tomatos still on the vine well late into the fall. Anybody can grow a tomato but alot of people also grow yellow sick tomato plants that don't produce very well and don't last very long."

I normally do news paper rip a section on the fold put it around form one side then another section from the other side , sometimes I don't prune as sell and the tomatoes that drop and touch the paper but not the ground don't immediately have bugs eating them.

with covid , and not being able to use my boxes and crates at the grocery store everything was bagged I had a lot of bags the wife would sit in a lawn chair and cut them while I planted , bagged and caged the plants

also with covid I have not been to the office in months where I collect up the news papers they put in a grocery bag in the break room. Work gets 4-5 news papers a day for the people in the office to read at break. normally I would go find my desk at least once a month, I work remote the rest of the month.

I get 2 tiny little free papers at home that amount to less then a section of the State Journal.

as much as I dislike paying for mulch I am thinking about getting some straw, I bag my lawn and wait for it to get long before mowing and it still isn't enough mulch.

I also let my lawn get long because I have a lot of white clover in the lawn. that attracts bees, if I cut half the lawn at a time I always have clover and an good number of bees. need pollinators around.

I had too much problems with bugs using straw and you don't want that moisture sticking around.

I used to use long rows of plastic which was nice. Like your paper bag idea then you just run the weed eater down through there bc its all away from the plant.

This year I mulched with bags of large pine bark mulch. I bought a entire bagged and stacked skid of mulch late last fall for $10. I did an asparagus bed with it too. We will see.

Greencounty pete… I'll post a picture of my staking for the grafted ones, but I had many Sweet 100's in CA. Just let them go wild. You'll get the clusters no matter what except for mildew. They should have named it the sweet 1000.

I'll never forget one year in August when I picked hundreds of them and made a tomato sauce for our annual dove shoot on the river. Big sausages cut up and cooked with the tomato sauce over pasta.

Pete

Here are some pictures of the grafted tomatoes and the others. These were planted about 6 weeks ago. Because of the lockdown here I planted my tomatoes at the farm in early March but here in town it was mid May. Normally it is the opposite.




Once they get a bit bigger I tie the secondary states to the center post.

And these are the normal ones


I need to do some weeding, but don't we all.

Good luck.

Pete

I have 600 tomatoes plants this year. I picked 800 pounds off of them yesterday ( they hit there peak ) it will be down hill from here on out. But pruning tomatoes all depends on the verity. I prune the indeterminate several times and only leave 1 prune under the 1st cluster of tomatoes and take all other prunes off as the tomatoes grows once the tomato gets about 42 inches tall I top the plant. On the determinate plants I leave the 1 prune under the 1st cluster and take every prune off below that prune, but do not prune the plants after that. So every prune above the 1st cluster I leave on that plant. I also do not top the determinate plants

Not my perfect setup. I just moved to this house and stuck things in the raised beds that were here. The plants are too close in my opinion but this is 5 weeks of growth in a Northern state planting after mother’s day.

It may vary a little bit with the variety of tomatoes you are growing. We tend to have a serious blight problem. Does anyone have blight resistant varieties that they grow? Does pruning help with blight?

Blit is a fungus. Fungus is from being wet. Read my post about air flow.

“Tomato Blight. ... Tomato blight refers to a family of diseases caused by fungus-like organisms that spread through potato and tomato foliage, particularly during wet weather. Blight spreads quickly, causing leaves to discolor, rot and collapse.“

Blight can be helped by pruning as Ohio boy said

it lets the light and air in

you want every part of a tomato plant above the soil to be dry to the touch for the majority of the day.


blight often comes with days and days of thick humid warm but not necessarily hot , where you just can't get anything to dry out sounds like VA weather

I have even heard of planting tomatoes higher using welded fencing to make hoops filling those with compost and growing the tomato plant on top of the compost hoop getting them off the ground 2-3 feet gets better air moment and the compost provides the nutrients with out nearly the splash up or drying out issues regular soil have

regular spraying with copper sulfate and calcium supplement can also help

copper because it is an anti fungal

and calcium because it helps cell structure and stability preventing blossom end rot, when plants grow too fast they can't move enough calcium through the roots to sustain the grown this is also where pulling those suckers while they are small and on a dry day slows the grow of the plant and forces the energy into the main vine and the side branches you want