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Pruning Tomato Plants
IF you want
the most fruit from your tomatoes, they should be pruned to
remove unnecessary shoots and leaves. Pruning tomato plants will give you
the best yield from the plants and better tasting fruit.
Pruning is not a difficult task but is a necessary one that
most backyard gardeners enjoy. It takes no special tools to
prune tomatoes. You simply pinch the unwanted growth (shoots
and leaves) away with your fingers.
Shoots that
you want to remove is the growth that has no buds or
flowers. Essentially they are nothing more than suckers that
take nutrients from the plant. Before you start to prune you
have to know whether your tomato plants are determinate or
indeterminate plants. Determinate tomato plants are compact
or somewhat bushy with short branches and clusters of
flowers at the end. This type of tomato plants are in full
growth before bearing fruit and do not require pruning. In
fact pruning them will probably destroy the plant. If your
plants are more upright as opposed to bushy then you have
indeterminate tomato plants that should be pruned to get the
best growth and flavor.
Tools are not
necessary for pruning. Using knives or sheers may introduce
unwanted disease into the plant that will diminish your
crop. Pruning maximizes the natural process of plant
photosynthesis whereby the sun becomes the energy source to
produce carbohydrates. In an ideal situation every leaf is
exposed to the sun. Each leaf stem exposed to the sun fills
with sugar including stems and leaves that produce no fruit.
These are the shoots and leaves that need to be removed to
increase optimum fruit. Essentially they are robbing sugar
from the fruit producing shoots.
Pruning also
minimizes the risk of disease. It actually helps improve
plant health by exposing more leaves and shoots to the sun.
Pruned plants allow
dry leaves to fall off faster reducing bacterial and fungal.
To aid in this process the plants should be staked or grown
in baskets to prevent them from falling upon the ground and
becoming shaded from the sun. If a plant or a portion of the
plant is shaded from the sun it will not mature and produce
little to no fruit.
Start from the base
of the plant and pinch off the unnecessary shoots and leaves
leaving only the fruit producing shoots. Later on in the
season as the plant reaches full growth the top leaves and
shoots should be removed to allow the plant to
continue to
receive sun energy to produce fruit.
See Fig - 1.
Fig. 1
Happy gardening!
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