do you prune your tomatoes?

need a break from the news and crazy

I was out pruning my tomatoes this evening

hard to pinch off those flowers when a nice tomato sounds so good right now , but I like to get them above about 18 inches before they branch out or they end up so dense that the fruit is hard to pick and the plants never dry out in the middle.

my goal is always to get them over the top of the cage then drape back down , I fall short of that some times.

once they get past 18 inches or so I start letting them have more branches




how do you prune?

Never have

I let em do as they please. I figure that plant knows far more about making tomatoes than I do.

Neighbor lady showed me how to prune tomatoes...pull all the suckers off. Big difference.

If you prune off the suckers, plant them and keep them moist, they soon root and have tomatoes too.

Keith

yeap suckers gotta go

Yup....if you don’t pull off all the “suckers” ....your maters will split. The skin on the mater splits . I made that mistake....

If you transplant late, you should prune, otherwise I let them be.

Get those leaves off the ground off, the rains spray the leaves and infection can enter there.
Hilling later to get root to grow out and draw in more moisture when the crop starts to fill, especially if you have dry/wet cycles
12 inches of roots in compost/organic can do a lot more than 3 inches in the ground I drawing up water in the heat of the day.

Been pruning as you are this year. Too soon for an opinion. I live in an area that has many commercial producers. Our crop matures in August and September. Growers with large crops probably do not sucker. They do train their plants to a single stake. On second thought, their plants do not have low limbs so I guess they remove everything somehow.

Tobacco is related to tomato and it also has suckers. Farmers remove the suckers to promote leaf growth. About 50 years ago a chemical named MH30 was used to retard the development of suckers. Turns out it is harmful to your health, so not allowed anymore on tobacco. Maybe it. Can be used on commercial tomato farms. Probably not. You could spray it on grass and it would stop growing.

I never use to but have started doing it the last couple of years. Mainly just the suckers and lower down branches. You thin them too much in the south and you will have sun burned tomatoes.

Me too! Suckers and lower leaves.

Garry-

When I lived in CA I always grew my tomatoes in hog wire cages about 3 feet in diameter and I let them turn into bushes. Lots of tomatoes and no chance of mildew because the humidity there was never a problem. here, mildew is always an issue and after several years of mediocre or bad results in cages I started growing them like everybody here does.

I plant them deep, after removing the bottom most leaves, and train them up a single stake. Every sucker gets pulled asap, and as the plant starts to get taller, any leaf that touches or is close to the ground gets yanked. This also promotes growth at the top. I never pull off any flowers and as a result the first fruit I get is at the bottom of the plant. Every week I have to pull off suckers and lower leaves, and by the end I have plants that are 5 feet tall and 18 or 20 inches in diameter with about the same amount of fruit that I used to get but the tomatoes have more flavor. I think someone on here years ago said that you can raise leaves or you can raise tomatoes... which do you want. Leaves take sugar as well, so fewer leaves mean more sugar in the fruit and they ripen faster. At the end of the season if I still have green tomatoes I cut off 90% of the leaves and everything ripens quickly.

Ever since I have no mildew, and rarely if ever treat with copper sulfate. I've got 25 plants at the farm and 35 here in town.

For the last few years I plant 2 or 3 grafted tomatoes. With these you need a serious main stake, (I use a chestnut fence post), and then two regular stakes the angle out. I train the main stem up one stake and the first big sucker up the other one. These plants get big and heavy so you have to tie the tops of the two stakes to the main one to support the weight of the fruit. I get 3 or 4 times the fruit off these than a regular plant.

Just my two cents, but it works for me.

Pete

What is a SUCKER, please.

When you have a branch off of the main stem there is often a new shoot exactly in the crotch. That is a sucker. If you leave it on it will eventually become a big branch of the plant and it will bear fruit. It all depends on whether you want to train a single stem up a pole or if you want a bush. If you choose, they are easy to snap off with your fingers instead of taking the chance of infection cutting them with cutters.

If you have a limb that isn't exactly in the crotch of the two limbs that is not a sucker and you should leave it.

They show up during the entire life of a tomato plant so you have to look every week or so.

As for the skin splitting, I don't see a connection with pulling the suckers. Skin splitting for me has been a problem with over watering. An old Italian buddy who grew incredible tomatoes year after year told me that you can water them all you want when they are young, but once they set fruit just give them little drinks.

You should be able to grow Boone and Crockett tomatoes in Arizona, just a matter of the water bill.

Good luck.

Pete

I don't prune um but after the dry spell we had the deer took care of my pepper plants and then decided to "prune" my tomatoes down quite a bit. Guess they were the most succulent plants around. Oh well...... they'll come back to me another way

When the first bloom hand forms, I move to the first limb below it. Go below that limb and remove everything below it. You may have to allow more foliage to form before you do that. I snip everything that grows outside my cages as well. As far as suckers, I think it depends on the variety.

Yes

Maters????

any pictures of what the grafted tomatoes and the staking look like?

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

Thanks for the advice, green county pete.

Maybe next year I'll try pruning. I never have and here's a couple pics I just took of my little tomatoes patch.





Lots of maters coming on.


What are these suckers you pull off?

watch the video I posted , lots of detail.