More in the theme of our “end of season” tasks. Let’s talk tomatoes and everything we can do to try and get the plant to eek out more mature fruit!
With those indeterminate tomatoes, they’ll keep growing until temperatures no longer allow them to do so. At this point in the season, with roughly 30 frost free days remaining, further plant growth is not going to help us. What we really want is for those plants to be focusing on growing and maturing the fruit.
About four to five weeks to our first frost, we top our indeterminate tomatoes. Yep, just cut the growing tip right off! This effectively arrests further vertical growth. But, when you do this, the plant will want to put on suckers everywhere. Remember, it doesn’t know that winter is coming for it, but we do! Continue to maintain those suckers, we want to stop every avenue of further growth as it comes up.
Another practice we like to perform with our indeterminate tomatoes is to trim off the lower half to 2/3rd of the plant’s leaves. We make little “poodle dog” tomato plants. This promotes better sunlight getting to those lower, ripening tomatoes and also reduces the amount of greenery the plant has to maintain. It also helps you see all those suckers that are going to start coming once you top the plant. Be careful around those flower and fruit clusters, you don’t want to inadvertently snip them!
The goal here is to give the plant nothing else to do than focus on maturing those fruit. In a way, we want the plant to think it’s “under attack” and stress it a little bit. This will induce the plant into working towards producing its offspring, which are those ripened tomatoes. In nature, these would just fall to the ground and the seeds would eventually spring into new plants. We’re not going to do that, though, we just want those fruit!
When it comes to determinate tomatoes, there’s not much benefit to topping unless your plant is still growing vertically. If you see freshly produced leaves at the very growing tip, go ahead and top it. We do like to remove the lower leaves for the same reasons we do it with indeterminates, again about the lower half (or so) of the plant’s leaves.
As we get a little closer to our first frost, perhaps about a week from now, we’ll also remove flower clusters and any very small tomatoes that have no hope of getting to size, much less ripening. Tomatoes will take at least 30 to 45 days to grow to size and fully ripen. So, once we’re at the “point of no return,” there’s no sense in having the plant have flowers or fruit that simply will not grow to a decent size. Again, our goal is to get the plant to put 100% of its resources and effort into fruit maturity that will benefit our harvest.
We do want to keep those decent sized fruit that might not fully mature. There are easy ways for us to “force” the maturation process later on, once we’ve harvested out the plants.
We know there’s a lot of “hope” (and even “denial”) among northern growers. It’s totally normal to think things like “Oh, if we just give that flower a chance, maybe it’ll work!” We’re here to remind you that it won’t. You know in your heart that winter isn’t all that far away. If you’re like us, maybe you’re just starting to welcome the idea of it so you can get a little bit of rest. In a month from now, you’ll be ready for it. So, prepare accordingly!
