First choose your permanent scaffolds, then thin branches that aren't necessary to harvest available light, then remove any wood of temporary branches that is crowding into your permanent ones. No need to sacrifice crop, but all fruiting wood should be well exposed to light for quality fruit. Having temporary scaffolds can be useful not just to increase crop but as a place to tape or weave upright shoots located on your permanent scaffolds to help create good horizontal secondary wood. Varieties like Goldrush, Arkansas Black, Honeycrisp, and Roxbury Russet, that are reluctant to create ample secondary wood, benefit from extra scaffolds when they are young. Summer pruning will be useful for this purpose as well. It's easier to really see the tree then anyway.

Mark, once a tree has fireblight, the bacteria is spread through the entire tree, even if the wood is healthy. At that point, all you can do is just cut out any branch that shows signs of infection. The aim at removing the branch isn't to rid the tree of fireblight, but to prevent the infection from spreading to other trees. I've read the literature on this and didn't believe it when I first read the fact that fireblight bacteria will travel all the way from the point of infection (flowers) down to the roots. However, over the last couple of years, I've had numerous fireblight infections that I got to observe. On an apple tree, fireblight entered through the blossoms and fast growing MM-111 rootstock sucker tips started to show infection. On a pear tree, a branch got infected, but the variety was fairly resistant. However, on the same tree that was grafted with other varieties, grafts of obviously highly susceptible varieties started to get infected starting from the graft point upwards. That was proof beyond any doubt to me that the fireblight bacteria had traveled all the way through the entire tree. Fireblight thrives on fast growing shoots, but can't really grow much in areas of the tree where the level of carbohydrates is high. So the best thing to do is to cut the infection out down to last year's wood. If the infection goes beyond that, then keep cutting to the next big branch. Oh, and cleaning nippers is a waste of time since the bacteria is throughout the tree.

In general, I do not prune much at all, and when I do it, it is only to keep a pathway open or to remove a branch with diseased foliage. My garden becomes a huge jungle, but a very productive one. In our heat (the last two summers, we have increasingly had occasional days with a high temp between 108-115 much more than we had them in past years) and in a garden with full sun for most of the day, I feel like the tomato plants need all the foliage they have in order to reduce sunscald and also to produce well. Remember that the foliage is the photosynthesis factory that keeps the plants producing. For every bit of foliage you remove, you're reducing the plants' ability to conduct photosynthesis. Benefits? Better air circulation if your plants are next to a structure, a stockade fence, or too close to one another. Perhaps a lower rate of foliar disease due to better air circulation and less foliage, but some years we are so dry we see little foliar disease here anyway. Perhaps bigger fruit but only because you'll have less fruit since the limbs you remove are not there to produce more fruit. Make sense? Negatives.? Less photosynthesis capacity due to lessened foliage. More sunscald. Fewer fruit overall, though the ones you get may be bigger....if you can keep them from sunscalding long enough to break color. Then, if you're worried about sunscald, you always can pick them at the breaker stage and bring them inside to ripen indoors. Because I want for every plant I grow to produce as much as possible, I try to not prune off anything at all, so cannot advise you on how much to prune. You know, if you decide to do it, you could prune some of the plants and leave the others alone and see which ones do better for you. If you prune and start seeing sunscald, you can errect shade cloth (kinda pricey, but it works) over your plants. I use shade cloth over pepper and tomato plants (only some tomatoes, not all) beginning in July in order to keep them producing longer and better in the extreme heat and long sunny days. By keeping the plants partially shaded, you can keep them happier in extreme heat and they will continue to produce longer as long as you don't use a shade cloth with a high degree of shading. I have 40% shadecloth and 50% shadecloth. Growing up in Texas, no one that I knew who gardened regularly ever pruned their tomato plants, and my memory dates back to the 1960s, Everyone caged them and used good spacing and let them produce all the foliage they could in order to prevent sunscald. I've always gardened that way and always have been happy with the results. I also do not necessarily follow good spacing rules every year. Sometimes I put the plants much closer together than I should, aware that doing so will give me a dense jungle, but I don't care, as long as I get tomatoes and lots of them. In some very wet years (2004 and 2007 come to mind), with lots of rain and high humidity, I did prune off the bottom couple of feet of foliage at mid-season to deter Early Blight. Most years, good mulching and good watering practices (putting the water on the ground, not on the plants) keep Early Blight under control but in a year where it rains every second or third day, we see more issues here with diseases like Early Blight, Bacterial Speck, Bacterial Spot or Septoria, and in years like that, I think that pruning lower foliage is beneficial but I won't do it until the plants already have set tons of tomatoes. Dawn

Okay, for better or worse,here it is! You'll note I decided to leave the Side leaves on though. I couldn't be that diabolic....yet.I plan to grow everything inside this year we had a long hot summer with plenty of 100+ degree days last year and it sent my plants into dormancy. By the time they did put out, it was damned near the first frost. Plus I have a neighbor who I'm pretty sure swiped one or two of my potted ones last year too. That's good to know LeafEricson, I've already got the cuttings in small pots!! I'll let you know what happens !!