clipping tomatoes

treehugger2012

11 years ago

I was in garden seminar and some discussion was about clipping tomatoes trees. Clipping the end of branches to allow the trees to go no more than 4 feet. The results were the trees grew wider and stronger. The crop was doubled and the tomatoes itself were larger. The moral of the story is clipping lets the tree concentrates its energy on the fruit rather than growing taller branches. I will experiment with that on half of my trees. Did any one ever did that technique.

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Comments (6)

seysonn
11 years ago
There has been a debate on pruning, trimming... tomato plants as long as I can remember. There is a merrit to it., especially, you dont want a lot of green tomatoes at the end of summer when they get tired. Height control is also an ergonomics issue for commercial growers.

BUT to me, as a home gardener is to stake them properly so that there is air circulation around the pants, to minimize desease and rotting.
digdirt2
11 years ago
Did any one ever did that technique.

Not if they had any understanding at all of how tomatoes grow. Or how photosynthesis works and why the leaves are needed. Or the differences between the 2 types of tomatoes - indeterminate and determinate, and not if they wanted maximum production from the plant.

As already mentioned, judicious pruning of indeterminate plants only can be of benefit for far north gardeners with short growing seasons. Otherwise its benefits all depends on how you choose to support your plants. String and single stake supports may benefit from some limited pruning. Cages, tripods, Florida weave supported plants do not.

The debate on pruning vs. not pruning has been argued ever since folks started growing them for food. So this "claim" is far from new. And the bit that the crop was doubled has been well-proven to be wrong. In fact the crop is reduced substantially in both numbers and weight and any increase in individual size is minimal.

There are all sorts of "magic tomato growing" claims out there. Once you understand the basics about how tomatoes grow you can quickly recognize which are valid and which are bogus.

Dave
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howelbama
11 years ago
I typically only prune the lower portion of my maters until they get to be a foot or two tall, then I let them rip.

My theory on this is that it allows the bottom of the plant to get better air ciculation and keeps the foliage away from direct contact with the soil which helps prevent a lot of disease.
jcrowder
11 years ago
I prune all my different kinds of tomatoes except for the grape tomatoes. I think those do better left alone.
Edymnion
11 years ago
I do not prune any part of my tomatoes unless there has been damage (like limbs snapping outside of the cage due to a wind storm).

Generally speaking, the plant knows what it's doing better than we do, so let it do it's thing.
spiced_ham
11 years ago
I don't know if there are new studies out, but the ones I read all had to do with the amount of perfect market sized tomatoes, from determinant varieties. That got twisted into things for home gardeners to do, IMO.

My own little experiments one year with twenty pairs of indeterminant heirloom varieties showed me that on unpruned plants over half of the fruit number develops on the main stem and its spits. If a plant is staked and sucker pruned to just the trunk and its splits it will develop slighty more total fruit than the trunk of an unpruned plant. But the fruit were not bigger on the staked plants. Suckers did produce smaller fruit, on average, than trunks for beefsteaks.

So fitting two pruned plants of eight total 'branches' in a cage produced noticably more than a single unpruned plant that had eight 'branches.'

I did not test brix or solids of the fruit, which might be commercially important, but the taste was the same to me, pruned vs. unpruned.

There is also the problem with disease (septoria and early blight) in a cage crammed full of leaves and suckers.

I top the plants and pinch buds starting six weeks before first frost because until a leaf is a certain size/maturity it does not furnish enough photosynthesis to support its growth rate so it is a drain on the plant or at best neutral. The baby leaves that are left on the plant when I top it will be almost full-sized when frost hits, all pumping energy into the fruit. Bud pinching also stops small fruit from developing that will never ripen so I end up with very few green tomatoes when frost hits, and the ones I do get are large and ripen inside nicely.

Finally, topping the plant stops it from falling over the top of my cages and off the top of my stakes.

So I will take two sucker pruned plants to one unpruned plant any day, as long as I can control for sunburn by planting a north south row instead of east-west.

clipping tomatoes

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seysonn

digdirt2

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