How to PRUNE + POLLINATE Any Tomato Plant | The Most Effective Strategies

[Music] this morning I found this kind of wildly embarrassingly overgrown tomato plant in a corner of our toddler Garden which is basically just our container garden I thought I would show you exactly how we prune these plants to keep them healthy and growing well and I'm going to try and make this video a little bit more beginner friendly I know a lot of tomato printing guides can be a little bit confusing and a little bit in-depth so I wanted to make one that will give you a really clear idea of exactly how to prune any tomato plants so you can walk into the garden later today and get it done yourself yeah let's go ahead and jump right into it and start cutting this poor Plant up foreign knowledge here the first thing you need to know is whether or not your tomato plant is indeterminate and this one is this is an indeterminate plant and most tomatoes are that's kind of the wild form of tomatoes an indeterminate plant just basically means that it will keep growing it'll keep dividing and putting off flowers and putting off fruit until a frost kills it or it goes dormant for the winter season if you're lucky enough to live somewhere where they just go dormant for winter rather than dying and a determinate plant a determinate type of tomato is basically a tomato that has been bred to have a special Gene that causes it to grow to a specific predetermined height usually kind of between three four five feet put off all of its flowers and all of its fruit over a period of a few weeks and then it's done for the season now the cool thing about determinate plants determinate types of tomatoes is that they basically have a self-pruning gene and that's relevant because well since they have a self-pruning gene we don't have to prune them or at least we don't have to do most types of pruning the other thing we need to know about our plant is whether or not it is a cherry tomato because we actually prune cherry tomatoes slightly differently than all our other types of tomatoes our slicers and our beef steak and our paste tomatoes right and I'll try and grab a cherry tomato from the back and show you what I mean a little bit later on but I know that this one is indeterminate and I know that it is a not a cherry tomato so we can go ahead and prune this one like you would with the vast majority of all of your tomato plants and the first thing that we need to do is go ahead and remove all of the suckers that's right we're going to be removing every single one of these little growing tips let's see here every single one of these little growing tips they grow in between the elbow joint of the plant's main growing stem and a leaf node this right here is a sucker that I just removed again right in between that elbow joint of the plant's main growing stem and a leaf node and left on check basically each one of these would become a little tomato plant that is growing on your tomato plant and then these suckers will actually produce suckers and you have sucker on sucker Inception and the plant just grows completely out of control which is why I really recommend a style of pruning called pruning for one liter where you remove all of these guys now that's often easier said than done because as home gardeners we often don't have the time to get out there and be pruning every day and you end up with plants like this one that have a bunch of suckers on there so let's go through the actual sort of mechanics of removing all of these because we have some that are small and relatively easy to remove like the one I just removed and we have some that are medium sized we need to sort of decide what we want to do with those and then we have some that are actually kind of huge and I need to decide what exactly I'm going to do with those so let's start with some of the medium sized ones so for instance we've got this guy right here I don't know if you can see this but we've got this guy right here and it's already starting to flower and basically the barometer I like to use is if the sucker is under one foot I'll go ahead and remove it but unlike that small one that we just took off I can't do it with my fingers small suckers are so easy just sort of push them to the side and and then you're done they're going to go ahead and snap right off it's so much easier if you can find them at that size but these bigger suckers these medium-sized suckers you actually need to use a sharp tool I've just got a little pair of pruners here so we'll go ahead and remove this medium-sized sucker it's probably about I don't know eight or ten inches from the plant now straight up removing a sucker this size kind of sucks like it is emotionally painful for me to do this I really don't like removing big healthy pieces of the plant and it stresses the plant out right the plant doesn't like it either and especially if you're just getting started with tomato growing this can be kind of an unfun painful experience right so let's talk a little bit about why we do it why it's so important and I think we really want to talk about the why because a lot of tomato pruning guides in my opinion incorrectly focus on preventing Leaf diseases preventing foliar diseases and yeah pruning can help with that but it's not the main reason we do this the main reason that we want to prune Our tomato plants we want to remove all of the suckers is so that we can grow more tomato plants so that we can maximize the number of tomatoes that we get out of a given space not necessarily out of a specific plant obviously I've removed this one from its main Garden area but out of the entire area in which we are growing tomatoes by removing these suckers we're basically controlling how much lateral space how much horizontal space this tomato is allowed to take up which is great because most of us basically have Infinite Space growing vertically right up into the sky unless you happen to be growing in like a greenhouse or something but most of us are constrained on how much horizontal space we have how much lateral space we have in the garden and so by removing all of the suckers on these plants we're able to grow a lot more tomatoes in a given space and that's true even if you are growing tomatoes in a container like this one so in our main in-ground Garden we're actually planting at every 12 inches we have a tomato plant every 12 inches and in our container garden we smash these containers right up next to each other so that we can get in the maximum number of plants the other thing that removing all these suckers does is it makes it way way easier to Trellis them right grow them vertically that in turn makes them much much much easier to maintain I don't know if you've ever seen an unpruned indeterminate tomato but they basically become like a Thicket they might as well be like a berry Bramble they're completely unmanageable they're difficult to keep healthy they're difficult to water they're difficult to fertilize they're difficult to check for bugs they're difficult to weed and most importantly unproned plants are very difficult to pollinate see what I like to do with my tomato plants is actually come in with an electric toothbrush and just to gently hand pollinate the trusses these flower trusses by putting an electric toothbrush at the base of the flowers and what that's going to do is basically ensure I get an almost 100 percent fruit set all of these flowers are now very very likely to turn into viable tomato fruits and that's just really hard to do when we have a giant out of control tomato plant hey by the way quick request if you're enjoying this video and you think you're learning something about how to prune your tomato plants and this is going to be helpful in your own garden would you mind hitting the uh the like the thumbs up button and basically it it just makes all the difference it is the main Catos that helps these videos get seen by other folks and I just I hugely appreciate it I really really do thank you so much let's get back to pruning these plants now let's talk about removing a giant sucker and I have a really really giant sucker to show you here in fact I don't even know at this point you even call it a sucker this guy right here actually was a sucker you can see that this is the main growing vine of the plant right here and this right here was at one point a sucker and it's almost as thick as the main growing Branch at this point when we're dealing with a sucker that is this large we actually need to do things a little bit differently rather than trying to remove it at the base like we did with the small suckers and the medium-sized suckers the ones that are under a foot that are a little bit younger we're gonna do something called Missouri pruning where we're actually going to go up to the growing tip right here and we're just gonna take off the growing tip of this plant so I'm just going to go ahead and cut it off right there sometimes this is called a topping I basically just topped this sucker and the reason that I topped it rather than removing it at the base is twofold basically it's less stressful for the plant to just top it up here instead of removing this whole giant appendage and two well it would be a huge waste to remove all of these healthy leaves that are photosynthesizing and creating energy for the plant so we might as well leave them on there but I'm going to go ahead and top it just so that it doesn't get out of control any further than it already has it you can actually see here we also have some suckers that are growing out of this sucker so we want to just go ahead and make sure that we're removing those as well now let's go ahead and finish up with the rest of the suckers on this plant because there are some more on there we've got kind of another medium sized one down here so I'll go ahead and just grab that on another one right here go ahead and clean that right up another one we'll remove right there just double checking to make sure that none are lying in weight here just kind of going through all the different elbow joints of this plant and yep I had missed one but luckily it's a small one I can probably just grab with my fingers here we are here's another one all right I think this plant has been successfully suckered I've removed all of them at least all the ones that I can see we may have missed some but you can always come back and touch it up a little bit later which means we should go ahead and talk about how we do this same process how we remove suckers for cherry tomato plants okay as I mentioned we actually prune our cherry tomatoes slightly differently than the other types of tomatoes and this right here this is a sun Gold by the way one of the absolute best varieties that you can grow and you can see that this one plant we have allowed to grow out into two liters and the way that we do that is we allow that main original growing stem to come in of course and then we also allow one additional leader one additional sucker to grow in we don't remove one sucker and traditionally in best practice here is to allow the sucker right beneath the initial truss of flowers right below the first set of actual tomatoes coming in to grow in so we go ahead and we look for that initial set of flowers we look right underneath it and we let the first sucker right underneath that initial set of flowers grow in and the reason we put in our cherry tomatoes a little bit differently is that cherry tomatoes are fundamentally different their growth habits are different obviously the size of the fruit is different the number of fruits they're putting off the number of flowers they're putting off is different in fact a lot of folks don't like to remove the suckers from their cherry tomatoes at all and in a vacuum they would be correct in a vacuum a cherry tomato will actually put on more flowers and more fruit if you don't remove any of the suckers the problem is is they become a giant unmaintainable mess they're totally a nightmare so pruning them down to two suckers in the real world actually ends up with better production because you're still getting two nice big growing vines but you're getting a plant that you can actually pollinate that you can actually weed that you can actually feed that you can check for insects that you can do all of those maintenance tasks for a cherry tomato that is pruned down to two suckers in my experience is going to give you a lot more food than one that is just allowed to go crazy the other nice thing is a giant unpruned cherry tomato is going to take up so much space that you're probably going to be able to fit maybe 30 percent 20 as many plants into that same growing area and what that means is you have a lot of risk if anything happens to that giant under pruned overgrown cherry tomato well you're kind of out of luck at that point because you only had one plant but like we have them growing here all pruned nicely to two growing vines if anything happens to one plant not a big deal I've got a ton more in that space that are healthy and ready to take over they're actually much less likely to get damaged in the first place because by removing all of those extra suckers the main growing stems the ones that we left on there are going to be much thicker and much healthier when you leave all of those suckers on Place each one of those Vines each one of those leaders is going to be very spindly in comparison to a plant like this that is able to put all of its energy into growing just two very healthy liters okay now we're back to that original slicer tomato that we were looking at before and there's just a couple other types of pruning that I want to talk about before I send you off into your own garden so you can get started doing this yourself and the thing I want to call your attention to is the fact that we still have a lot of lower leaves on this plant a lot of folks really put an emphasis on removing the lower leaves from your plant and generally I don't like to do that as much I think these lower leaves are valuable for the plant they help it establish itself they help it make sure that it has enough energy they help shade out the stem I like to leave these on but at a certain point they do become net negatives for the plant at a certain point they're not actually receiving all that much sunlight because there's a big old canopy up here shading them out and they also just become old they become withered they become damaged and now they're drawing more energy out of a plant in order to maintain themselves than they are giving back through photosynthesis so we do want to go ahead and remove them at a certain point and you can see I'll remove a leaf here this one has become pretty yellow at this point that is a very old leaf and it is ready to go so we're going to go ahead and removed the lower foliage from this plant now I'm pretty conservative about it I don't go crazy I'm just going to remove the leaf stems that are clearly beginning to die off this one certainly right this one long since dead and there we go I've just removed three of the lower Leaf stems from this plant thank you all right we've got one last task to take care of before we can walk away the plant's looking good it's well pruned it looks nice and healthy you can see that it's fruiting really really well already everything looks great but we need to make sure that all of these flowers are getting pollinated and this is just a really easy thing to do while you're already getting in there to remove that foliage to remove those suckers grab an electric toothbrush any super Cheapo one will do I think I got this off Amazon for like four bucks turn it on and just walk over to the individual flower trusses and just place that electric toothbrush at the base of those flowers just for a couple moments and what that's going to do is dislodge the pollen keep in mind that tomatoes have perfect flowers which means each flower is both male and female this is going to dislodge that pollen from the male portion of the flower into the female portion of the flower and ensure that we have a really really good fruit set none of the flowers so far on this plant have dropped they have all become fruit so far and one of the reasons for that is while conditions are good right now that that makes a huge difference it's not too hot it's not too cold but the other reason is that we just occasionally come by with our electric toothbrush and do this task right here we hand pollinate these flowers and now the plant is ready to go we can go ahead and put it back into our container garden or if you're growing in the ground you can just walk away you're good to go the other thing you can do to make this sort of a less emotionally painful process is actually root these suckers what you'll do is after you cut them off remove the lower branches remove the lower Leaf stems like I've already done here and here you'll just stick them in a cup of water eventually the sucker will actually begin to set Roots as I mentioned before it's basically just a little tomato plant and once it is begun setting root you can actually plant it you can put it in a little pot and have it wait for later or you can put it in the ground and just have a new tomato plant you can have a little army of these ready to go in case anything happens to your main tomato garden if you lose a couple plants say some pest rips a couple of them up well not as big of a deal because you have a bunch of seedlings ready to go just like a little nice insurance plan there and also I just think it makes it easier to to go through with the task of actually removing these suckers okay let's go ahead and do a quick recap here one if you are growing a determinate style of tomato plant you do not need to do any of the pruning that we talked about today maybe you can remove some of those lower leaves but that would be about it two if you're growing in indeterminate style tomato plant and it is not a cherry tomato you should go ahead and remove all of the suckers unless you have a really big sucker on there in which case you're just gonna top it you're gonna remove the growing tip remember that Missouri pruning three if you are going in indeterminate cherry tomato you want to go ahead and remove all of the suckers except one you want to leave one sucker on there to create a strong y or a double leader system and that is it I hope after watching this video you have a much better idea of how and why to prune your tomato plants and you have a chance to get out there today and do it yourself let's get Garden in

Channel: Nextdoor Homestead

Views: 33,328

Keywords: how to prune a tomato plant, pruning tomatoes, tomato pruning, how to prune tomatoes

Id: _NeMBnW2KV8

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023