Growing tomatoes takes some work, time, and dedication. Tomatoes love water, need nutrients, and air flow is important for healthy tomato plants. Today I am sharing with you how I like to prune my tomato plants once they start growing upwards and outwards.
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Garden chores never seem to end and for that I am actually pretty grateful. I know, grateful for chores? Crazy. But anything to do with the garden, I’m in.
Some plants in the garden you can plant and not touch them again until it’s time to harvest. Others, like tomatoes, you have to tend to the whole season.
Tomatoes need to be pruned, watered, fed, and depending on the type may need to be trellised.
Why Prune Tomato Plants
There are a few reasons why you would want to prune your tomato plants, air flow being a big one.
As tomato plants grow, they grow upwards and outwards. Typically you wouldn’t want a short bushy, tomato plant as there is minimal airflow which doesn’t allow the plant to produce as much fruit and creates a bigger potential for disease.
By pruning your plants, you are helping put its energy into growing deep and strong roots, and growing good fruit.
You also don’t want the leaves of your tomato plants to be touching the ground as moisture also puts plants at risk for disease.
How to Prune Tomato Plants
Pruning your tomato plants is actually super easy and one of my favorite garden chores.
You will want to start at the bottom of your plant and look for suckers. These are the little sprouts coming out of the armpits of the plants. Sounds silly but the picture below shows the sucker coming out of “the armpit”.
To remove the suckers you can pop them right off by using your thumb nail. The suckers will create more leaves therefore restricting the airflow.
The next step would be to remove the leaves, or “arms”, at the bottom of the plant. If they are close to the ground, it would be beneficial to remove them. And just like the suckers, you can use your thumb nail and first finger to cut the arms off.
Below you can see the before and after I pruned one of my tomato plants.
You can see from the pictures, I removed two arms on the bottom of the plant, there is one on the bottom right hiding. You can also see that I removed the suckers, the tiny sprouts in the “armpits”.
The “arm” on the bottom right will most likely be removed as the plant grows. Again, you don’t want the arms or leaves to touch or be near the ground if you can help it.
After Pruning
You may be wondering if pruning will leave any leaves at all on your plants. If you do it right and only remove the ones closest to the bottom and the suckers, you will be just fine.
As the plant grows, you will find more suckers and more leaves. My rule of thumb, once the plant grows a couple feet, you can slow down on the pruning just a bit and let the plant fill out. This is when you will start to see flowers starting and fruit forming.
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