Susan,

Everyone has to do what they think is best and I'd never quarrel with anyone's choices. However, I never prune or pinch....never have, never will.

In our climate, pruning is very risky. We have very intense heat, high temperatures and sunlight here. Even with no pruning, sometimes tomatoes hang on the plants a particular way that leaves too much of the fruit exposed to sunlight and it gets sunscald (sunburn) which renders the fruit inedible most of the time. (Sometimes only a small portion of the fruit burns, and if the fruit is almost ripe, you can pick it, let it finish ripening indoors, cut away the scalded part and eat the rest.) Usually, once sunscald sets in, the fruit rots and is good for nothing except to feed the chickens or compost pile. So, by pruning, you run the risk of leaving too little leaf cover for your plants and that can ruin your crop.

Also, leaves are the photosynthesis 'factory' that feed the plants and make them grow. Removing leaves slows down the growth, but since the object of growing tomatoes is to grow tomatoes, I don't want to do anything to impede their growth.

I don't pinch either. In some climates you can do it because your air temperatures are going to stay low enough that heat/humidity will not impede pollination. Where we live though, the temperatures are often hot enough to impede pollination (not on small bite-sized tomatoes though) by mid-June, so if you're pinching off your early flowers, you won't have much of a crop and that's especially true if the heat arrives in May like in did a couple of years ago (in 2008, I think) at our house.

Now, I have to tell you a funny story about pinching and pruning. When we lived in Fort Worth, we had a neighbor who seemed to go out of her way to be unpleasant to everyone. She spoke to virtually no one and didn't even respond if you waved or said hello. She lived right next door to us in her mom's former house after her mom passed away. One year she decided to grow tomatoes. Having grown tomatoes 'the natural way' with no pinching and no pruning my whole life, I watched with great amusement as she removed EVERY branch and EVERY flower in April, May and June. Eventually, she had tomato plants that were 6' or 7' tall. They basically consisted of a long, slender, staked main stem and maybe 10 leaves at the top...no branches, no fruit, no flowers. We were harvesting tomatoes by the dozens when her husband asked me for 'tomato advice'. He was concerned because they didn't have any tomatoes. I was pretty much speechless. I finally told him that I didn't know what book she was reading about raising tomatoes but that its advice was not applicable to growing tomatoes in Texas. I told him you don't get fruit if you remove every flower because the flowers become fruit. (Duh!) And, I told him the plants can't produce if you remove 95% of their leaves because they cannot conduct enough photosynthesis. He kind of rolled his eyes and said "Maybe it is better if I just not say anything to her, after all." I just nodded my head. Apparently he found her as difficult to deal with as the rest of us did. That is, of course, an extreme example, but whenever someone starts talking about pinching and pruning I remember those poor, pitiful plants in the yard next door to us.

I will prune if a limb sticks out into a pathway, but before I prune it I'll try to stick it back through the cage and get it to grow in some other direction. If it persists in blocking the path, I'll take it out.

You certainly can root suckers or cuttings from spring plants for fall plants as long as your plants' new growth is disease free. They root in just a few days. I usually start different ones from seeds for fall because I want to grow other varieties (long-keeping types, for example) for fall, but it is always nice to know that rooted cuttings are an option if the seed-starting doesn't go well, or if the rabbits find the patio and eat the fall tomato seedlings or whatever.

Dawn

I pruned last year and plan on pruning again this year as well. I prune mainly because I do square foot gardening and my tomatoes are close together.

This is the pruning method I use. See the link below for more details.

{{gwi:1092387}}

Early pruning encourages strong stems. Remove all suckers and leaves below the first flower cluster. Pruning also affects plant health. The leaves of a pruned and supported plant dry off faster, so bacterial and fungal pathogens have less opportunity to spread. Soil is less liable to splash up onto staked plants.

After this initial pruning of the bottom branches, I will prune just the suckers off of the indeterminate tomato plants.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pruning Tomatoes

A horticulture professor I know used that article as a source for teaching about pruning tomatoes. I was going to post it, but you beat me to it! I plan to prune my tomatoes this year following the guidelines in that article. I was originally going to prune to 1 stem, but have since decided to prune to two for added protection against sunscald. I'm not too fanatical about any one way of pruning, it's more of a process of experimentation for me. Plus, pruning appeals to my somewhat finicky nature. :)

-Matt

P.S. It all depends on your particular situation I guess... I'm in urban OKC where sun exposure is at a premium to say the least. If I were in a more rural setting, I would probably be more worried about too much sun exposure. Sometimes I feel like that would be a good problem to have...

-Matt

If I had as many tomato plants as Dawn has then I wouldn't prune because it would take way to long.

I'm a militant anti-pruner and agree completely with Dawn.

Diane

Matt,

We definitely have full sun here, so our challenge is to keep the fruit shaded. I'll concede that folks like Diane and I likely have entirely different challenges than those faced by urban or suburban gardeners.

My plants produce better if I can site them where they only get 6 to 8 hours of sunlight in July and August, but that's hard to do in a garden that mostly has full-sun exposure. Some folks here erect shade cloth (50%) over their tomato plants using PVC hoops to suspend the cloth above the plants. They feel like it helps prevent sunscald on developing fruit and keeps the plants producing better in the heat. I've experimenting with shading the plants a little, but not much. Summertime is just too busy if you have a large garden, fruit trees, berries, flowers, a yard to mow, etc. This year, if it is a typical, hot, dry summer, I may try to find the time to put up shadecloth and see if I think it makes a difference.

No one here in Love County that I personally know does any pruning at all except to keep pathways clear or to removed diseased limbs. Most of those folks do garden on a large scale like I do, so the time needed to prune their approx. 200 plants would make doing so impossibly difficult. Boomer, I not only don't have time for pruning in the summer, but I rarely have time for anything else other than maintaining the garden and putting up the harvest. (I'm not complaining---I love doing it all.)

A lot of y'all probably aren't blessed with gobs and gobs of sun like Diane and I are. Living in a rural area can be a mixed blessing. With wide-open spaces, you have lots of good air flow which can help minimize disease too, but the downside is that the high winds that accompany thunderstorms or strong squall lines can blow over plants--even if they are caged and well-staked.

There are other ways to prevent foliar disease besides pruning too. Most years I don't have much trouble with it at all....last year was worse than most because it rained every day or every other day and we had Septoria Leaf Spot, which we seldom have trouble with. If you mulch every square inch of your garden soil to reduce soil splash (and I do), and if you water using soaker hoses, drip irrigation or some other method that keeps water off the foliage, that helps a lot. You also can spray preventatively with cholorathalonil...something I say I'll do every year, but then never do because it doesn't fit it with my organic philosophy. I'd say "but this year I really AM going to spray with Daconil" only y'all would laugh because I say that every year and don't do it. Proper plant spacing helps reduce disease but I don't tend to abide by spacing rules very well.

Remember if you do engage in pruning and pinching blossoms that you should disinfect your pruners (and your fingers if you're pinching) each time you finish one plant, below you move to the next. Otherwise you could be inadvertently spreading disease from plant to plant without realizing it.

Dawn

I have never and will never pinch blossoms. Thats sacrilege!

I think it really depends on if you have a big garden with lots of sun or a small backyard garden with just enough sun.

You could always experiment. Prune one tomato plant and see if you get any better or worse production than your non-pruned plants.

Typically if you prune you will get fewer, but bigger tomatoes.

Susan,

I have a limited space kitchen garden. I never have more than 20 tomato plants. I don't have the room.

I prune suckers early on to develop a strong stem and get foliage off the ground, but never ever pinch blossoms (although in reality you are pinching blossoms by pruning suckers on indeterminate tomatoes).

Because sunscald on tomatoes could be a problem, I try to be judicious about pruning suckers to ensure I have a nice canopy of leaves to protect the fruit where the sun is the strongest by the time the heat sets in. I know exactly how the sun moves in my garden spaces and where the sunscald problems 'could' be. So, all in all, it's probably more of a shaping for shape, space, circulation, protection and fruit size that I prune for.

I know from experience that the fruit set above where I might cease pruning suckers because of heat is about half the size of the fruit set on the pruned stem. So I have nice, big tomatoes early in the season and smaller fruit later. It's a mix I can live with.

I guess all in all I am a middle of the road tomato pruner.

Marcy

Thanks everyone for the fantastic responses. I think I will proceed with pruning as you suggested Marci and see what happens. Dawn always says I am an adventurous gardener, so I will venture forth. I don't even grow 20 tomatoes, though.

So far, it's just going to be:

Black Cherry
Lime Green Salad
Burpee's Heirloom
a Beefsteak I forgot the name
Victorian Dwarf
Jelly Bean
Rutgers
Jet Star

Now, that is a LOT for me! You guys are too influential.

We'll see what happens. I won't prune the suckers on the Lime Green Salad, Jelly Bean, and Victorian dwarf.

Susan

Susan again personal preference. And no right or wrong way. Here with our intense sun I don't touch a stem unless it is damaged. Otherwise I never touch a stem,leaf or bloom. Again like Dawn I have full and intense sun. And with 88-100 plus plants just have too much to do to worry about pruning. I would never tell someone not too. I have my reservations about the radical pruning a few do. It wouldn't work here for me but in a climate with milder temps and less intense sun maybe it would. I highly encourage anyone willing to take and accept risks to experiment. I do every year with something. Pruning isn't one area I've experimented with though. Keep us informed of your results. Jay