How To Stake, Prune And Tie Tomatoes - Single Stem Pruning Method

good evening everybody it is May 20th and I just got back from an 11 day trip to Australia the weather at home was gorgeous and sunny and warm while I was away and during that time my tomatoes have grown completely out of control so I'm going to take this as an opportunity to make a little tutorial video on how to single stem prune your tomato plants up against steaks now last year I trellis my tomatoes on a very large trellis and I'll link to the video above because I made a very in-depth video on how to trellis your Tomatoes but this is a very different situation because when you grow a when you grow using a tomato steak you want two single stem your Tomatoes when you use a trellis you can use either one or two main stems and the reason why is the trellis will support the tomato in all different directions but when you grow against a steak like this you really want just one main stem and I will show you exactly what I'm talking about here okay this is an example of a tomato they pruned to one single stem you can see it starts here at the top and then it goes down follows a single main stem consistently all the way to the bottom here's the where the stem meets the ground and if you follow it all the way up it never branches off that same stem twists around that tomato steak while I was away this tomato right here formed a double stem and went completely bananas here you can see the main stem here you can see where the main stem was but over here it branched off made these huge fruit clusters and I'm telling you none of this existed when I left 12 days ago this is all 12 days worth of growth it's crazy so I'm going to show you how to cut this down into a single main stem because a tomato steak can not support a tomato plant like this you would need a trellis to keep a double stem like this now before we begin there are a few principles to pruning that you need to know now a tomato plant will sucker this is an example of a sucker right here in we nee mainstem any leaf will suck her out at a 45-degree angle and each sucker can turn into an individual main stem so you can basically have a limitless number of main stems I strongly recommend Rekha I strongly recommend limiting your tomato plant to two main stems at the most no matter what and the reason why is your roots are only so large so the more main stems you have the more fruit clusters you will have the smaller and less desirable the fruit will be the slower they will be to ripen because your root system can only support so much growth on your tomato plant but if you do decide to grow two main stems you're really going to need to trellis your tomato or you're gonna wind up with this mess you're going to leave for a few days and your plant is going to it's going to spider in two different directions and then the worst thing will happen like this one it will completely split in half under the weight of the fruit from the second main stem so this is kind of the mess that I'm coming home to after being away for almost two weeks so you'll need a trellis if you really want to main stems if you grow along a tomato stake you have to limit yourself to one or you're not going to be able to appropriately stake and support your tomato and you'll have fruits breaking and falling over just like that example that I just showed you so you're going to need two tools in order to prune and stake up your tomato plants aside from the tomato plant and the steak itself one is a clean pair of shears they have to be clean you have to sanitize them I wash this in hot soapy water with dish soap another alternative would be to spray them down with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide but you want them to be sterilized because you don't want to spread disease and when you cut into your Tomatoes any kind of bacteria or fungus --is that are on the blades you're basically injecting them into your plant the second thing that you need is a method of tying your Tomatoes to your steak or trellis or whatever you're going to use you can use twine you can use twist ties you can use old torn up shirts my favorite thing to use though is this vinyl garden tape and the reason why I like this is because it expands see this that will expand until it eventually snaps but it takes a lot of force to snap the reason why I recommend the vinyl tape is because it will not constrict the growth of your stems on your tomatoes if you use a twist tie or twine they don't really stretch so as the tomato plant matures the stems get thicker and thicker and they actually wind up growing into the twist tie or the twine and they wind up actually choking off the growth of the plants themselves and then you have trouble with transpiration which is the uptake of water from the roots into the tops of the tomato plant you're basically putting a noose around the tomato so that won't happen with this vinyl tape because it stretches so the first thing you want to do is you want to select which tomato stem you want to use as your main stem generally you want to use the thicker more fruit Laden stronger stem as your main stem this stem right here is a good bit closer to the tomato plant but as you can see it is the inferior stem it is thinner and there's not much fruit on it this one is much more laden with fruit so even though it'll be harder to tie up this is the one we want to go with it's thicker it's more vigorous it's holding on to its flower clusters better so what I'm going to do is I'm going to tie this off very carefully to my tomato stake and then I'm going to prune this stem off leaving only the fruit clusters and I'll show you how to do that now what you want to do here is you want to make very close contact with the tomato stake but you don't necessarily need to touch the vine to the tomato stake that's not really necessary what I want to do is I want to put a little loop through this through this main stem so at hold and so it holds it in a secure fashion and it doesn't go flying and again you can do this because this is stretchable tape then you want to just pull it to within about an inch or two of the tomato stake just to loosely secure it and you do not want your fruit to touch steak if at all possible because as the fruit swells it will start making contact with the steak you want to try to keep it off to the side so now my main stem is supported so this stem right here is now becoming a major liability so what I have here is I have a fruit cluster dangling here I have a fruit cluster dangling here if you can see that I want to save that I also have a nice little cluster of fruit that's forming right here so I'm going to try to save them so I'm going to lop off the stem right there all this is just green growth that the root system can't really support and make the the fruits big enough anyway if you look this is this is a hybrid tomato it's a steak sandwich hybrid so that's why it is so heavily laden with fruit it's really bred for production and this variety happens to taste good from Burpee as well so I'm going to prune off the suckers I'm going to prune off any low growth right here the first thing you always want to do is remove the growth on the firt up to the first fruit cluster because water splashes the bottom of the soil and it will coat the underside of your leaves with mud and that mud carries viruses and bacteria and that's where you usually get your blight and your leaf spot from so make sure you prune them off then I'm going to prune off any leaves that are sticking back here because I want to keep all air flow back here in the center airflow will keep the disease away from your plants as long as possible by keeping the leaves dry the more airflow your plants have the drier the leaves will stay the less disease you'll get the other thing I want to do is I want to do a quick sucker check and pull off these little suckers right here that are growing all over the place because they're going to form more main stems and suck the energy from my plant and put it into producing more foliage instead of larger fruit that ripens more quickly so this was a pretty easy prune job because I've been maintaining my plant pretty well the there's just a few more suckers up here that I really want to take off see that guy right there you want to take that guy off because that will turn into another big heavy mainstem that just sucks a lot of energy from your plant pull off this little sucker right here no need for that get rid of that and then you'll see right here I have this extra what used to be the the second means them this needs support because as this fruit cluster got as this fruit cluster grows and as this fruit cluster grows it's going to put more and more downward momentum pulling down on the plant and I'm going to get splitting at the at the Union right here right behind this this fruit right here if you can see it where the where the initial suckering took place so I have to tie this up really well or else I'm going to get another split like the tomato plant I just showed you where the fruits are lying on the ground and that would not be good that would not make anybody happy so let's tie that off and just pull it into the stake just a little bit and now that will give this branch or this means them rather this stem adequate support for the time being this will probably give me about seven days worth of added support so what's going to happen is these fruits are going to get bigger and bigger especially up here and they're going to pull more and more down on the plant and I'm eventually going to have to add a tie up here as well to kind of minimize that fulcrum effect it's going to try and split the this stem so you're gonna have to keep adding ties so this is an example of a plant that was pretty out of control that really got away from me while I was away I'm gonna take that be false as well it's pointing in the back I'm gonna show you a more normal plant as to how you will routinely prune your plants and hopefully you won't be away for almost two weeks like me and they won't get so out of control on you okay this is a plant that is going to be more of a routine pruning it hasn't gotten away from me just yet but it will if I let it go too much further follow them follow the original stem out of the ground and you will see as you come up you'll get a good sized sucker here we're gonna pull that right off get rid of that guy because that's useless and it'll just suck energy and then at this fruit cluster right here what will be a fruit cluster you will see I'm starting to get another sucker here so look at these two suckers what you want to do is you want to spare the stronger sucker and if you ask me here we have a nice flower cluster that is starting to set fruit you can see the flowers starting to dry up hopefully they will all be Tomatoes you see another flower cluster starting up there you also notice the diameter of this stem is bigger than the diameter of this stem so this is going to be the stem that we remove and all we're going to do is we're going to take our clippers and we are going to capitate this big sucker that would be a problem if we let it go too much further we're also going to pull off any of these little suckers that are forming along the way here's another sucker and we're gonna have to cut that guy off and any branches that are sticking out into the center remember this is my alley that I want to maintain airflow through so I'm also going to cut off this branch right here and we're going to take a look at any of these branches down here anything that may be too low we're going to lop off as well and I'm going to take off this branch right here because it just looks a little bit too low for me and that guy is going to go the last thing we are going to do is we are going to apply another tie and get this really close to the stake but we're going to try and offset it just a little bit so when this fruit eventually forms it won't be compressing against the stake so I'll show you how I'll do that now we are going to wrap our vinyl tape right underneath a leaf node and we're just going to try to pull it reasonably close to the stake keep it around an inch or so away that way it'll give it some support but it won't push the plant too far uncomfortably against the stake I'm also going to add another one up here and the reason why is I want I want this flower cluster to set tomatoes out in this direction I do not want that flower cluster to be confined into here because the tomatoes are going to grow they're going to swell up and they may break that flower cluster off as they try to push in this direction that's a no-no so we're going to add one more tie right there so this is really just a lot of common sense stuff but it's it's common sense stuff that you really have to think about when you hear somebody say it you you'll say oh that's a that's a really great idea why didn't I think of that or oh that makes a lot of sense but you may not necessarily think about it because it's not something that most people do every single day so you just kind of have to figure it out as you go along the last thing that you want to do with any pruning project is you want to remove any damaged or diseased leaves and if you look right here I have a little spot right here I'm not entirely sure that that is diseased it doesn't look like disease it could just be sun damage it could be from fertilizer it could be from a lot of different things some kind of overabundance of nutrient of nutrition or maybe I need to fertilize but it's generally a good idea to remove leaves that look like this because if it is some kind of disease you want to remove it before it spreads what is very important is you do all of your disease pruning at the very end because you don't want to make a lot of pruning with shears that have touched disease leaves because you could spread that disease it's even a good idea to clean your shears off in between pruning each plant so I'm going to go ahead and remove that because it just doesn't look good and it's probably nothing at this point in the year but it's just a good idea to try and remove all of the funny-looking leaves just to ensure that you don't have a disease problem early in your garden all right so I just finished pruning up my Tomatoes you'll see I removed all of the leaves that were sticking out this way and this way so now I have a nice straight shot right over to my eggplant you can see them clearly in cages back there and you can kind of see the cucumber growing along the trellis it's actually a pickling cucumber so that straight shot will maximize airflow and really help keep disease pressure down in my hot humid summery climate in here in a coastal southeastern North Carolina guys thank you so much for watching I really hope you find this video helpful as I said before I really recommend you check out the other video that I made on pruning last year because it goes into a lot of detail as to different methods different methods of stemming your tomato plants and using trellises so between this video with tomato steaks and that video with trellises that should give you a really good primer on how to prune your Tomatoes for maximum productivity disease resistance and good size healthy fruits if you haven't already please subscribe to the channel for future updates thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you all again next time

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 2,417,713

Keywords: single stem pruning, tomato stakes, tying tomato plants, single stemming, tie tomatoes, staking tomatoes, tomato cages, staking tomato plants, how to tie tomatoes, how to prune tomatoes, pruning tomatoes plants, pruning tomatoes, pruning tomatoes seedlings, support tomatoes, tomato trellising, how to prune tomato plants, growing tomatoes, tomato plants, how to grow tomatoes, tomatoes, pruning tomatoes for maximum yield, pruning tomatoes in containers, raised beds, gardening

Id: 6lqlTQKX5PQ

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019