How to Prune Tomatoes

pruning tomatoes

Knowing how to prune tomatoes is a useful skill,If you want to be able to harvest plentiful amounts of homegrown tomatoes, you need to prune the plants. The first question to ask yourself, when learning how to prune tomatoes, is which kind of tomato vine you have. If you have a determinate vine, your plants will stop growing at a certain time and produce more fruits and leaves. The fruits are usually all ready to be picked at the same time. If it is an indeterminate variety, it will produce tomatoes that ripen over several weeks.

Types of Tomato Pruning

Simple tomatoes pruning means you pinch the sucker (branch-to-leaf cluster shoot) between your fingers and snap it off. Missouri pruning is another way and you just inch off the growing tip, while allowing the leaves to stay. Anyone who knows how to grow tomatoes will advice you that Missouri pruning requires more maintenance because you also need to prune further suckers growing on the original sucker.

How to Prune Determinate Tomatoes

The first thing to do, if you want to learn how to prune tomato, is to take off all the blossoms until the tomato plant is well established. This helps the plant to put its energy into growing bigger and stronger, before producing fruit. You need to remove any suckers as they appear because they take energy away from the main tomato plant stem. Try to do this at least once a week. Removing large suckers is riskier for the plant and will open a wound in the stem, which might result in pests or disease.

You should "top" the tomatoes plant when it is almost the end of the growing season. This means you should pinch of the growing tips of the plant, to give the rest of the fruits a chance to ripen. If you don't do this, your tomato crop will be unripe and hard. If you want huge tomatoes, you can take off all but one blossom from each cluster, so the plant directs all its energy into the one tomato on each stem.

How to Prune Indeterminate Tomatoes

This is slightly more complicated but it is a vital step in securing the health and wellbeing of your tomato plants. If you don't prune an indeterminate tomato plant, it can form up to 10 vines, meaning it ends up on the ground where pests and diseases can target it. The tomatoes on such a vine are susceptible to sun-scald and rot.

Knowing tomato plant pruning is all about following these steps correctly, in order to produce the finest, tastiest fruit. So the first thing to do is to take all the blossoms off until the plant is between 12 and 18 inches high. Remove every sucker from under the first fruit cluster. If you want a single vine, take all the suckers off. If you want 2 vines, let another stem grow above the first fruit cluster. If you want 3 vines, let the sucker above this one grow too. If you keep the side stems near the first fruit cluster, they have more chance of being strong and producing plenty of tomatoes.

Knowing how to prune tomatoes is important if you want a healthy, abundant crop. Tomato growing steps like these can be tedious at times but it is part of learning how to prune tomatoes and will mean delicious results for you!

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