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How to Prune Tomatoes for Earlier Harvests, Higher Yields & Healthier Plants - YouTube
Channel: OYR Frugal & Sustainable Organic Gardening
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Today I'd like to share a few simple tomato pruning techniques for earlier harvests, higher yields, and healthier plants.
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It's important to note up front that these techniques apply only to indeterminate tomatoes,
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which are vining tomatoes that keep growing and putting out new suckers, buds, and fruit until killed by frost.
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Determinate tomatoes, on the other hand, are bush tomatoes that usually don't grow taller than 4 feet.
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Their fruit ripen at roughly the same time and then the plant dies.
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Pruning determinate plants will significantly reduce their yield and is not a good idea.
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Even indeterminate plants don't have to be pruned, but we choose to for the reasons I'll share in this video.
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We grow our indeterminate tomatoes on trellises and space them only a foot apart.
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Each sucker of an indeterminate tomato essentially produces a whole new plant,
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so pruning them makes this close spacing possible, and allows for adequate light penetration and air flow around plants.
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If we didn't prune, the tomatoes would have to be 2 to 3 feet apart.
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Though pruning can reduce the yield per plant,
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it allows us to grow more plants in a given area, thereby increasing our overall yield.
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Removing the extra growth also focuses more of the plant's energy on producing blossoms and ripening existing fruit,
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which can lead to an earlier harvest and larger fruit.
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We look to prune suckers that are developing below new blossoms.
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Here you can see a blossom growing off the main stem at the top of the frame,
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and just below there's a branch going off to the left
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and a sucker growing diagonally between the stem and the branch.
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This is what we want to prune.
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It's best to prune suckers when they're relatively small.
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Removing a more mature sucker would leave a larger wound, which could be more susceptible to infection.
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When identifying suckers, you can think of the sucker as an extra arm growing out of an armpit.
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The intersection between the main stem and the branch form the armpit,
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and the sucker is the extra arm growing out of it.
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To combat early blight and keep our plants healthy,
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we also prune all the leaves that hang within a foot from the ground.
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Early bight is a fungus that colonizes on leaves and produces brown spots.
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It can eventually kill leaves and significantly reduce fruit production.
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Lower leaves are typically infected first due to their proximity to the ground.
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During rain storms, early blight spores in the soil can splash up and come into contact with leaves.
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Pruning the bottom leaves not only eliminates infected leaves and those likely to be infected,
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it also increases light penetration and air flow,
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creating a less hospitable environment for the fungus.
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We typically do this pruning after the plants are at least 4 or 5 feet tall or we see infected leaves.
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Finally, some of the tomatoes are already taller than the 8 foot tall trellises.
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If I don't top off the plants,
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they could very well be twelve feet tall by the first frost.
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Of course, they wouldn't just keep growing straight up.
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Instead, they'd slouch over the top of the trellis and hang down over the rest of the plant,
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which would create a tangled mess and increase the plants vulnerability to diseases.
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So, I'll prune the plants just above the top of the trellis.
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This is a height I can comfortably reach and manage.
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Topping them off will also help the plants focus their energy on producing fruit,
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which is our ultimate goal after all.
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So, there you have it
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our simple pruning strategy for earlier harvests, higher yields, and healthier tomatoes.
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Well, that's all for now.
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Thank you very much for watching,
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and until next time remember
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you can change the world
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one yard at a time.
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