How to Prune Indeterminate Tomatoes & Identify Suckers

ever wanted to know the absolute Surefire way to find a sucker and remove it keep watching this video because I'm going to tell you the 100% success rate way to always get the sucker the way I'm running my [Music] tomatoes welcome back to another Nature's always right episode today we're going to be talking about pruning our tomatoes and I'm going to show you how to prune them from their baby stage all the way up to adult plants like this that are producing fruit so the next step before planting we need to prep these transplants what we want to do is take off about half the vegetation on the plant and I want to leave three to four layers on the vine here the way I'm running my tomatoes is a central leader single liter I'm going to take it down to three initial layers here so one two three and then here's even the fourth layer sometimes when you pinch it it'll tear the skin and make a rip which makes the plant have to heal that wound area and it's wasting energy on that it's also a site where an infection could get in um damaging the plant maybe even losing it so just trying to you know keep the plant as healthy as possible from the beginning here snipping them is a little bit safer all right and then I'm just leaving one two and three tiers the fourth tier is here but I'm going to leave it my tomatoes are if they were taller I could get a little more aggressive with this I want to make sure that when I'm looking at the plant it's got at least three main fan leaves here these are the sun collecting leaves they're going to help produce more photosynthesis create more Roots get the plant bigger so I'm pruning the Amish paste right now and I need to prune these up so that it looks something more like this and you can see on this one I've taken off about half of the leaves and the suckers the reason I'm doing this is to promote more root growth and when I bury this in the ground I'm going to bury it up to this node right here and if you can see these hairs these are places where Roots will most likely pop out of and they'll pop out of these nodes as well and it'll just create a lot more root structure for the plant giving it more access to water and nutrients um you know a more vigorous root structure the better the the plant will be the stronger it will be so that's what we're kind of trying to encourage here I'm also looking for any suckers if there's any larger suckers I'm going to take those out right now as well sucker is a competing Vine that tries to come off of the central leader and it will actually flower and produce fruit as well you know there's so many different techniques and ways that people grow tomatoes so I'm just showing the way that I do it and obviously I'm still learning still trying to dial in my methods and I'm trying different techniques here and there to see what works best best and I found that this this idea of trying to create more root structure in the beginning is is a a really beneficial thing to do so I just want to show you guys something really fun that kind of proves and just shows how amazing nature is and just kind of my whole philosophy that nature is always right and that you know these natural patterns are designed and they're here for us to use so check this out guys so this is called the Fibonacci spiral so check this out so here's my lower Branch my lowest branch is right here take that off spin it to the left the next branch that I come across is a little bit higher I keep spinning the next Branch I come across is a little bit higher I keep spinning it the next Branch I come across is a little bit higher and so on and that is an example of a spiral pattern it's layering itself going higher and higher as it goes around the spiral and can you think of any other pattern that is like a helical spiral pattern well DNA is like that that's the main one I think of um and trees also mimic this same pattern the same pack packing efficiency and basically just all it does is allows for the most balanced amount of light to hit all around the entire circumference anyways just is a cool observation of a natural pattern and how amazing that is so I'm going to prep all my tomatoes so that they're ready to go later this afternoon when I plant them I want to plant them once the weather is a lot cooler it's about 83° today in full sun so I wouldn't want to plant these midday they'd get wilted it would just uh stunt them and give them a lot more stress some of the tomatoes might not even make it so it's best to plant either early morning or late afternoon first Tomatoes we're going to check out are these chocolate cherries and every tomato varie is a little different they all grow slightly differently these guys are pretty cool because they have double flower fruit sets so when you see the fruit set it'll it'll split and go into two which is pretty cool let's check out another tomato so this is the Amish paste and most Tomatoes will just put off one flour set off of the main stem like that so down here we're can see the fruit developed it's coming off one fruiting cluster so anyways the chocolate chip berries are very productive very delicious I definitely would recommend trying to grow them so when you're pruning tomatoes and cucumbers and even um fruit trees I really recommend starting to prune and analyze the plant from the bottom up um and that's just going to help you to give the plant the best shape and ensure that you're finding all the suckers or anything you need to remove since these plants are already really established it's the end of June and I put these in at the beginning of May I believe so they're super established I've been harvesting fruit off them now um so most of the suckers have already been removed because we've done a really good job occasionally another sucker will pop up in a crotch um but so you can just do a quick check of the places you've already gone to and move your way up so first thing I'll check for just to show you guys is suckers but I'll I'll prune off uh Sun leaves and suckers I'll do it all at the same time but I'll show you guys in steps and then we'll put it all together at the end in a final process so first what are suckers and you know let's find some one thing to keep in mind we are pruning these tomatoes to a single leader this is the te technique that I'm using some people let their suckers go wild some people train to single leader some people do double leader which is pretty cool uh but for myself I'm doing single leader and single leader means that that you're keeping the main stem being the main Fring part of the plant for its entire life the single leader has the the best connection down to the root structure if you start letting the suckers go off now you're now you're splitting the energy of that plant up and a sucker can produce fruit it is going to take off a lot of energy from the root structure and it's going to start putting it into another secondary growth now if you're doing a two tiered structure then you want that but since we're doing single leiter it's going to be a waste of our energy uh we won't get as much fruit production if we let it a Rand sucker go and don't train it we really want to remove all of those so you can think of the sucker the reason we call it sucker is because it's tricking you into believing that it is the main growth stem but it's not okay so so as you saw on the young plants I showed off the sun leaf right a sunleaf they have leaves that look like this there's no flowers on them and they come off the side of the main stem so if we come up the plant here here's a flower section Fring section and if we follow the main stem the next Fring section there it is it comes off the main stem boom next flower section is here comes off the main stem keep going up another fruiting section comes off the main stem so right now we know these are sun leaves this is what a fruiting cluster looks like okay so the next thing we need to look in the crotch the crotch 90% of the time the sucker is going to be in a crotch okay the crotch is just where the main stem and the sunleaf meet and creates usually a 90° angle somewhere around that and in the middle the sucker will grow out so I've pulled all these off as we go up the plant now looks like we've got some stuff going on here so on this variety it likes to put off Sun leaves and the actual sucker off of the crotch some varieties will do that and and you should be able to identify the difference between a sucker and a sunleaf by the shape I'm showing you guys a little bit more advanced stuff if you really want to understand suckers and what they look like and what they are and to get them 100% of the time even when they're not in the ideal crotch location then you got to understand uh the leaf identification so see how these are much more Broad and wide that's a sunleaf this one here the leaves are more narrow some more smaller leaves curled up on the inside and that is the sucker and what's going to actually happen with this as this grows bigger and stretches this will become a sunleaf this little piece will become the leader of the sucker and this thing will stretch up and will produce fruit just like this one will so if you could imagine it this little sucker is going to stretch up just like this guy and eventually it'll shoot off flowers like this this but we know this is a sucker it's growing in the crotch a rule that you always want to keep in play when you are removing suckers so say you identify one you think that's a sucker okay well yeah I'm pretty sure but don't pull it off yet look up double check that that is for sure the sucker and there is for sure the next leader okay that's going to really prevent you from making a big mistake so as we can see there is another leader up here and I just want to show you guys that a lot of tomato plants will develop a little bit strange it does not hold a consistent pattern so don't hold a consistent pattern in your mind you need to know each individual leaf and that's what's going to tell you what's the sucker and not so as we know I've pointed out that these are suckers right so we're going to pull these extra Sun leaves off too I just I don't like them growing in there it just reduces air flow and they don't really help photosynthesis very much anyways so now we know this this is the leader right so let's keep moving up and here's the fuing cluster so here's my big secret on how to determine whether or not this is a leader or not so if you're looking up the central stem here you see flower structure coming off the main stem now a sucker will always be so far behind the central leader it won't have this flowering structure coming off the main stem yet but if we were to let this sucker that I had here Let It Grow eventually that little stem I showed will stretch up out out to here and it's going to shoot off a flower cluster just like this one but when we're trying to identify we want to go up and see that NYX flower structure that proves to me this is the main leader so let's keep going this variety shoots off a sunleaf off the crotch of the flower cluster this is not a sucker and I know that because it's got broad leaves and the broad leaves keep going down they don't have that little vertically shooting frilly leaf that is normally right there for the sucker so I don't really like these leaves that much I'm just removing them okay let's keep going up okay now this plant's getting weird right so it looks like we've got two crotches and then the actual main leader is coming out of the center of that crotch so what can become confusing you you're thinking crotch the sucker's always in the crotch well that's not the best rule to go by because that's not always true sometimes the actual leader is in the crotch and that is where it causes people problems sometimes so that's why I'm going to show you guys a couple more examples of this so here we go so let's identify our main leader right so we've got Sun leaves coming off the sides here here we've got leaves here coming out of a crotch on each side and then a central stem coming up now let's think about my flower thing I just mentioned the main leader will always have the flower structure coming off of a stem and that has that doesn't that okay if it's the case that this is the leader then I should be able to find the the central leader right here and this is it this right here is the leader this is what's going to stretch up and become the next growth of the plant this will become the next sunleaf so let's remove these suckers there and there's one more right there should be very very gentle at the top of the plant you can snap it okay so now we've ensured we've removed all the suckers here's the exential leader it's going to continue on now the next step I would train this to the line but I'm going to show you guys that in a separate video okay we're going to print another one but let's just take a quick look at the way these plants work so about every foot or so you will have fruiting cluster sunleaf sunleaf fruiting cluster so it's you know there's a pattern that it actually creates fruiting cluster a couple Sun leaves then another fruiting cluster and it just it's in these sections so it the plant is created in these big chunks so that's another way that you can uh think about the plant okay guys here's our NYX tomato and I'm just going to zoom up to the top for our example okay so let's analyze the plant so all the way down we don't have suckers I'm just coming up here to show you the couple sucker places so let's come up when we're looking at this um this Leaf what's this Leaf it's got broad leaves there's no flowers it's a sun leaf let's go up to the next Branch this one as well right that's a sunleaf what's the next highest Branch okay well this one's in the crotch it you see how it's not perfectly in the crotch so that will happen a lot so just know that suckers don't always grow perfectly in the crotch they can kind of come slightly up as well so let's make sure this is a sucker right let's take a look at it well it's got a sunleaf a sunleaf and then what's this thing got something more special coming off the center here this whole Branch here is a sucker but this can become another leader this can become a part of the plant that produces fruit okay so we don't want that now let's use my technique of of double checking right so let's go up the plant we've got a fru and cluster and isn't that our our 100% indicator we've got a fru and cluster coming off of the main stem that's higher than the sucker okay so this has to be the leader let's keep going though let's double check keep going up sunleaf there's a sunleaf sunleaf and here we go here's the leader sunleaf sunleaf and we even have more evidence because there's another Fring cluster right here all we really needed to identify the leader was this main fuing cluster coming off of the main stem okay you can see the sucker has not even started to develop its flowers yet it's about to in the next day or so this this sucker will start putting off some flowers but it doesn't matter because when you go back up the plant and you see this main cluster coming off the main stem you know that's the leader for example if you let this sucker grow for another week or so it it is going to shoot off flowers just like this main stem but the way you'll know it's the sucker is because this fruit has already probably started developing or it's much further along this will just have its flowers first developing plus it's also in a crotch and that's the guarantee that it is a sucker okay guys so if you've got bigger suckers it's good to clip them just to prevent any stripping sometimes the skin of the the Tomato will tear so you want to prevent that so cutting that off always throw away all your cuting from cucumbers squash and tomatoes and throw them away or compost them if you're composting them at high heat and that's going to prevent any disease um spreading because tomato cucumber and squash Leaf can carry a lot of disease and spread them easily okay so now this guy is done there's nothing else to really remove you know when I get to the top here this is a sucker coming out of that crotch a lot of times I'll even leave that little one just in case just to be sure sometimes the the the top leader you know occasionally you'll get a random disease or you'll get a grasshopper or something will come in here and chew that off and break it and kill it which means the only way this plant's going to have new growth is out of a sucker so sometimes leaving the small sucker like this even though I could remove it is a good idea because um sometimes something goes wrong with the plant and it's it's good to have a little bit of a backup so you can keep that in mind as well okay so here we have a rare situation but it does happen on uh tomato plants occasionally and that's where you'll get a sucker and the leader looking almost identical and that's because it's not growing directly out of the crotch and that's what's so confusing about it so let's take a look at this and I'll show you the single determining factor that will always tell you if you're dealing with the leader or not okay so here we have the main stem and then it's branching off into two individual stems okay obviously both of these are growth points either these could produce fruit they both have flowers they're both about the same point along in their development but what is the one difference between these two that is that this one has a flower set coming off of the main stem and only a liter will have a flower set coming off of the main stem in the beginning stages of its growth you'll notice that the the sucker here does not have any flowers coming off of a main stem it only has flowers coming off of its next leader the next growth point for this sucker is right here and that's going to if I let it grow it'll continue to grow up and eventually this flower set right here will actually it's when it stretches out it will be on the on the stem just as this one is but in the beginning stages only the true leader the one that has direct connection to the roots in the ground will have the flower set coming off of the main stem so that's how you can always always know okay here's the third and final example I'll show you and this is a great one because this is a really developed sucker that we missed um that's going really long and it proves my method of finding the true central leader so all try to show you guys it's hard to film this let's just go up the plant together here so we're coming up coming up coming up what do you guys see right there there it is so this is a sunleaf coming down this is the central leader something's in the crotch it is a sucker so as we come up you'll notice there's no flower cluster coming off of the stem at all here's another sucker coming off of the sucker and the crotch there there's another another sucker here coming out of the crotch another sucker coming off the sucker and then it finally has its fuing cluster up here so let's double check is this the leader could it be well let's go back down and let's come up the plant we're coming up we're coming up we're coming up look at this it's a gigantic Fring cluster so obviously this is the leader so I just want to show you guys that even though we missed this sucker and it's crazy developed there's no flower cluster coming off the main stem yet still so my little method of looking for the flower crust cluster coming off of the main stem this is the 100% way to always know okay now you know obviously looking in the crotch is great that's a great way to look it's a great thing to do okay so let's so this one's a big one right so I'll just clip it and then if you guys can see this sunleaf it was connected to is looking a little unhealthy and gross I'm just going to remove that so the next part that we're going to move to is um pruning them removing Dead Leaves or leaves that are just not functioning anymore or not photosynthesizing well they're not getting enough sun and we're going to do that to increase sunlight and increase air flow amongst the tomatoes so let's check that out next because we're doing lower and lean here with a single leader um we're pruning pretty aggressively Curtis Stone calls it hard pruning what that what they mean when they say hard pruning is just you're removing all of the leaves as the plant's moving up and growing so as you can see here it's all bare stem we've got two fruiting clusters and then as we move up the plant we've got more leaves and we may want to remove more of them um so things I'm considering here um air flow and light and how much shade it's casting so the Sun is going to come from this direction and come over top like this running east to west what is it going to shade out as that happens is it are some of these leaves not even going to receive much sun like possibly this one cuz it's being shaded out by the leaves on top of it if it's not receiving Sun it has more potential to to get powdery mildew or a fungus it's going to reduce air flow it also I've got basil interplanted in here maybe blocking some sunlight to the basil um so these are the kind of things I'm considering usually every time we prune we're taking off a couple Sun leaves now if you're growing heirlooms and tomatoes that take longer to develop and that are larger and and you're not in a greenhouse with some shade cloth on it and it's exposed to open sun you can get um tomato sunburn with um larger Tomatoes having some leaves that kind of cover up and shade out the Tomato can help it um so I wouldn't hard prune a beef Ste B uh tomato as hard as I would cherries because these ripen and you pull them much quicker they don't get sunburn really that was another reason actually for me going with full cherries since I do grow out in the sun and it's the hot southern California Sun last year when I did beef steaks and some other heirloom large heirlooms a lot of them did get sunburned so that's why I shifted more towards this but anyways back to the pruning that's going to be good enough for me now this plant here is going to provide a little bit of shade onto the fruit um um and then now more light's going to be able to penetrate in here and get the basil and everything okay this plant looks really good there's nothing diseased on it if there's some gross leaves I would remove those and we'll be harvesting this fruit here in another week or two it'll be all be gone and we'll keep moving up the plant and also pruning encourages growth uh upwards so as we trim the leaves down here it's helping to stimulate growth at the top of the plant to put out and keep growing upward last example I'm going to try to just take you through my all my steps putting it all together from top to bottom here so here's the bottom of the plant we're going to start moving up as you can see this plant is directly underneath the plant above it so these leaves are getting shaded out and I can even see a little bit of mildew on these okay so I'm even seeing a little bit of powdery mildew there and the leaves closer to the ground are more susceptible to disease and the other reason for pruning often is you're removing these leaves that are getting diseased really quickly getting them out of there the longer they sit on there the more likely they can spread it to another plant or farther up this plant so some of these plants I lean them a little bit too far so the tomatoes are touching the ground um but I'm going to cover exactly how to lower and a lot better I've removed all of the sun leaves I think I want to remove okay Fring cluster I don't see any suckers okay it's the next Fring cluster so far so good no suckers okay we've got something here what is that is that a sucker or a sunleaf it is a sunleaf okay you can see it's got broad leaves horizontally spaced leaves nothing going vertical and it's connected to the fuing cluster

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 1,047,132

Keywords: organic gardening, nature's always right, pruning tomato plants, pruning tomato seedlings, tomato sucker, indeterminate tomatoes pruning, tomato trellis, how to train tomatoes, how to prune indeterminate tomatoes, how to prune tomatoes for the best harvest, prune tomatoes, tomato pruning, how to trim tomato plants, gardening for beginners, how to prune tomato plants, organic gardening tips, epic gardening tomatoes, how to grow tomatoes, indeterminate tomato farming

Id: jJRTtQqK6qQ

Length: 26min 4sec (1564 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 03 2018