If you’re growing tomatoes, at this point, you should be giving serious thought to pruning your tomatoes. We use a pretty aggressive pruning methodology to maintain growth where we want and to encourage fruiting and ripening within our short growing season.
We exclusively grow indeterminate tomato varieties. These plants will continue growth and internodal vining pretty much throughout the season, putting on fruit that matures at different times. Whereas determinate tomatoes will grow more controlled, kind of like a bush, and will typically fruit and mature more or less simultaneously.
Indeterminate tomatoes are a pretty unruly plant. If left to their own devices, they will very much take over any space. Sometimes this is desirable, but our goal is to utilize our vertical growing space in our gambrel greenhouse as much as possible. So, our objective is to grow them tall and vertically.
To do this, we pretty much remove all suckers. Suckers produce between where a branched leaf and the main vine occur, usually at a 45 degree angle. Some tomatoes have slightly different growing characteristics, where they’ll branch their main stem. Tomato flowers, and thus tomatoes, typically produce as a separate branch off a main vine or sucker vine.
If you’re new to growing tomatoes, we do generally recommend watching how the plant evolves, only trimming what’s necessary to maintain space and cooperation with other plants nearby. Like we said, tomatoes are unruly and don’t play by rules. Some varieties produce flower clusters off of secondary vines, but not the main vine and all sorts of weird stuff. The goal is to keep the flowers, but, you’ll likely find you have to keep them in check.
We also generally trim the bottom leaves. We don’t want leaves in the soil, as this promotes disease and bugs. Once our plant is about 3 foot tall, we trim the bottom foot of branches and leaves. As the plant grows even taller, our eventual goal is to remove all branches up to the first flower cluster. This promotes great air flow and will stop problems before they occur.
Oh, and if you’re growing determinate varieties, you can kind of let them do their thing. We do trim the bottom leaves, for the same reasons stated above, but these plants tend to be much more controlled. You might find yourself having to remove a branch or two to maintain physical space. But, overall, determinates are “easier” from a pruning perspective.
Pruning is a very regular thing we perform, at least weekly. Those suckers come on fast and in numerous quantities. When you think you got them all, do another pass and you’ll likely find you missed a half dozen. They’re sneaky!
There are other philosophies around growing tomatoes. For example, at our community garden, we also grow indeterminate tomatoes as well. Here, we have space and a desire to grow wide and not tall. So, we just let the tomato do its thing and it will act more like a bush, pushing out its vines every which way. But, we strongly favor the “single trellised vine” concept most of the time, just for ease of management and growth.
