Pruning an Overgrown Tomato Plant! ✂️🍅🌿// Garden Answer

hey guys how's it going so today I want to talk about pruning tomatoes so I'm out in the vegetable garden and I've got a few different examples to show you one of which is sitting here right next to me this tomato plant was planted in May and it has clearly had absolutely no maintenance and no pruning done on it whatsoever so now I've got this huge mess that I need to take care of so this is going to be a prune overhaul job and then I've got a few smaller Tomatoes that I'll show you that I just recently planted that may give you a clearer idea on how to start pruning your Tomatoes from the very beginning so you don't end up with this so there's a few reasons why pruning your Tomatoes is just a good idea for the overall health of your tomato plants first of all it helps keep their size in check which I'm growing these tomatoes in raised beds so I don't really want to afford them the space to grow this big I mean I have strawberries planted all the way around this tomato that you can hardly see anymore and I really would like to get some production out of those as well if you have a huge garden space and you can let your tomato sprawl out and that's how you've always done it and it works well go for it I know a lot of people who still grow their Tomatoes that way but I just like to keep my things a little bit on the tidier side and use my space a little bit more efficiently second of all when you let your tomatoes Bush out like this all of a sudden that one plants root system has a ton of growth to support so instead of sending energy into creating nice big Tomatoes which we all want it just is sending all of its energy to keep all of this foliage and all of this growth growth healthy and while all of these branches may produce Tomatoes there they'll usually be a lot smaller and you won't get nice big sized ones and then the third reason why it's a good idea is that it opens up air circulation around and through your plant which is so good for the health of the plant because it reduces insects and disease so you don't want foliage touching the ground you want to be able to see some light through that tomato plant so while I'm not going to be able to prune this one all the way down to like one single stem which I'll show you on my other ones I'm doing that method with those it'll still be a little bit bushy but I'll open it up a tremendous amount first of all I do want to mention you only want to prune indeterminate tomato plants so there's indeterminate and determinate tomatoes which you may have heard those terms before determinate plants are usually smaller like dwarf or Bush type tomato and they only produce one large crop of tomatoes so if you go in and prune those the way I'm going to show you how to prune these indeterminate tomatoes you'll lose a whole bunch of tomatoes so you just want to let those determinate ones grow to their full size you can go ahead and clip some of the foliage around the base of the plant off to help reduce insects and disease but that's all you really want to do on those indeterminate tomatoes they will keep growing and producing as long as it's a healthy plant so that's why pruning is okay on indeterminate but don't do it on determinate tomatoes so basically when you prune your tomato plant which it may be a little bit more clear on my other examples you're pruning off either leaves or suckers which will turn into branches so let me show you what a sucker looks like I've got a nice good-sized branch sitting right here it's kind of twisting around which will probably come off today but you can see this little growth right here it's in between this main stem and a set of leaves right here this is a sucker and you want to pop those out as soon as you see them now if you were to leave those they would become a another branch and it would produce tomatoes but like I said you'll have a bunch of branches with a bunch of really small Tomatoes so you pinch those out and then it can just focus its energy on producing larger Tomatoes now you see if you follow this branch even further this is a sucker that has gotten a lot bigger so I'm gonna take my snips here and you would cut it out like that right there so the overall number of tomatoes that you may get like the number the count of tomatoes may be smaller if you prune out all your suckers like this and don't let them form Tomatoes but they will be bigger and really if you keep your Tomatoes pruned nicely I could fit three tomatoes in this 3 by 4 size bed and essentially get probably just as many or more Tomatoes but they'll be nicer sized so now I'm gonna start pruning up this tomato and I know that there are probably some of you out there who are dealing with the same issue that I'm dealing with so I hope this gives you a little bit more confidence a couple of thoughts though before you start in on something like this you want to do it on a dry day in the morning if possible and not on a day when you're expecting any rain either that day or the next day because we're going to be cutting off some rather large branches which will leave some large open wounds which infection can start pretty quickly if there's a lot of moisture going on also I'm fully expecting some of the growth that I expose underneath this stuff to burn a little bit because we're right in the middle of summer it is hot but tomatoes usually bounce back really quickly so first off what I'm going to do is take out a bunch of the branches that have grown outward and then everything along the bottom so let me grab my kneeling pad and I'm going to use a pair of larger Clippers for this the snips weren't good for smaller suckers but you can see like this branch right here I'm going to follow it back and cut it at the main stem look at that there are no tomatoes on this branch yet just a few blooms and I may be sacrificing some Tomatoes along the way but like I said in the end it's okay because I want to have nice big size Tomatoes now look in here look at all the tomatoes that are already forming on the inside of this plant and they were totally shrouded they couldn't get any sunlight to absorb any vitamin C I mean this is just gonna be a good thing overall so you can see the next branch right here let me go in and cut that one off at the main branch again another branch that has no tomatoes the plant was just supporting kind of nothing there and then I'm also gonna go in you can see these leaves and I'm going to clip those off anything that's touching the ground because when you have a tomato leaf touching the ground it can get splashed back from water when you're irrigating or from rain and that can start disease especially if there's no airflow and it also creates a nice little bridge for insects to climb up your tomato plant a lot easier so I'm gonna continue pruning out any branches that are hitting the ground and growing out from the bottom and then any leaves that also are touching the ground and then as I move up the plant I like to kind of go slowly and really address what I'm pruning off and start by pruning a little bit first and then you can always prune more out so like this big branch right here I'm gonna go ahead and clip this leaf off right there so I can see into the plant better I'm gonna clip this one off and I'm just gonna start exposing this branch a little bit more so I can see it and see right here where it's like two very strong branches I'm gonna go ahead and cut the bottom one out because this one has a potential of being staked to grow higher so let me cut that well take it out no tomatoes on that one I'm always happy when I see no tomatoes it isn't a fun process to cut Tomatoes that are forming but I just know that in the end it's so good for the plant so here we go here's a branch that has a tomato on it I'm going to just go ahead and cut it right after the little branch that has the fruit like that and so that's what I'm gonna do I just kind of slowly address what's going on I will probably put my snips in here and get out any more leaves that may be blocking some of these Tomatoes I didn't even know I had the stuff going on in the middle cuz oops because I couldn't see it I couldn't see what was going on so this is very encouraging so here we go [Music] so this looks incredibly different than it did when I started I mean look at all the airflow and like this whole tomato plant is gonna be able to get now and there were tomatoes that were ripe that I didn't even know existed inside this plant because I couldn't see and that's the thing when you prune your Tomatoes like this all of a sudden harvesting is easier you can see what you've got in there and the interesting thing about what I just did all of this growth that I cut off today I only actually cut off 3 small Tomatoes that was the only fruit that was set on this plant so I think what happened is I had an initial growth from my plant that set fruit started to form it and then we got really hot all of a sudden and we had a huge boom of growth so I had this enormous tomato plant with hardly any fruit on it but a ton of leaves a ton of growth this plant was trying to support so I probably wouldn't have ended up with very many more nice-sized Tomatoes like this a couple of things I did say before that I am expecting a little bit of leaf scorch maybe a little bit of fruit scorch but you can avoid that if you provide a little bit of shade because when you prune this hard in the middle of summer I mean this stuff has not been acclimated to the full Sun it's been shrouded by all of that growth so you either want to throw an umbrella up or put some shade cloth around your plant just for a little while so the plant has a chance to acclimate so I'm going to be doing that I'll set it umbrella up right here because the afternoon Sun comes in this way and that's the Sun I want the plant to be able to avoid for the first few days also the top growth here you want to be very careful about what you cut and I did not cut anything from the top I'm not sure at this point which one which branch is my main leader because it kind of branched off and there's a lot of big branches down there but if you cut the main leader of your tomato plant what will happen it's called topping your tomato it will focus all its energy on just ripening the fruit that's there instead of continuing to grow and produce more fruit so I will probably leave most of this alone I'll go in and maybe like pinch out suckers that I find you know I could fuss on this for a while and do that but I just don't want to top the plant until it gets to the height that I want it and I'm going to put an extra stake in here so I can let it grow a little bit taller so basically I hope the gives you a good idea of what to do if you've let your Tomatoes kind of get out of hand so at this point I'm going to apply a midsummer feet of tomato tone and I'm just going to follow the instructions on the back of the bag which tells you on single plants to use three tablespoons and just sprinkle it in a kind of a band around your plant and work it in so I'm gonna do that and then we'll get it watered in and then I'll show you the smaller tomato plants and if you can't find tomato Tom garden tone works really well I am put bio tone in this raised bed when I planted the tomato so it had a good starter fertilizer to get going and it definitely got going really well so your midsummer feed you don't necessarily need to use bio tone you can use tomato tone or garden tones great so in this raised bed right here I have three tomatoes that I've just recently planted so there are a lot smaller and a little bit of a better example of what they should look like if you're wanting to keep your Tomatoes pruned to just one main stalk which is what I'm gonna do with these so you can see on this right here I've got a stake next to each one of them you don't necessarily need to have a cage a tomato cage around tomatoes that you're going to keep in one just to one stock so this is a garden treasure tomato and I've got it to where all of the foliage has been pruned off of the bottom so there's nothing touching the soil and then as you move up I want to show you a couple of suckers and this is what you should be doing from the very beginning so that you can avoid what I just had to show you there so I've got a sucker right here you can see the main branch here and then there's a leaf coming off and then there's the sucker so I'm just gonna pop that out and then as we move up you can see another one right here so we've got a main stalk and a sucker in between now this one right here is a little bit interesting I wanted to show you this because I've got the main stock and then it has formed two stalks and I can't really tell which one is the main I'm thinking it's maybe this one right here so in this case you can leave two if you want to I'm going to go ahead and prune this one off just so I can show you guys what it's like just like that so now we've got one main stock and then as you move up I like to use these these are called they're from rapper clip soft wire ties they're a metal twist tie that have a soft foam around them and they're super easy to use and they're reusable which is really nice so you just want to keep staking your tomato as it climbs so let's move on this one I've already done in the center this is a Sun sugar cherry tomato now these get massive if you let them just go I did that last year and I regretted it this is another garden treasure tomato that needs quite a bit more work so I thought I would just leave it so I could show you what I'm gonna do I'm gonna start by removing the lower foliage first see right here this is a perfect example of a sucker you've got the main branch there's a leaf formed right here and then look at that sucker there so you could take that out alright so I'm actually gonna take off these kind of larger ones right here too so I can see these were kind of damaged too and usually the lower leaves will show damage first so I've got rid of all of those now we're gonna address what's going on up here I'm gonna actually remove the stake that came with it so we've got two branches again one of them you can tell was a sucker this one right here and it has a tomato on it that's actually showing some blossom end rot so I want to keep this one to one branch so I'm going to cut this off right here check that out that looks much better so then I'm going to stake it toward the bottom here and then I'm just gonna continue up the branch removing any suckers so you can see right here I've got a sucker there's the main branch there's a leaf we'll pop that sucker off same for here and in here perfect these tomatoes are all done other than these do not need to be fed because I just recently planted them like I said so I added bio tone into the holes with them so they won't need this for a little while maybe another month month and a half and I'll come in and feed these again so that's pretty much it you guys I hope this gave you a little bit of well information and maybe a little bit of courage on how to prune your Tomatoes after seeing me handle especially the one that's a huge mess in my garden which looks much better right now it makes me very happy so thank you guys so much for watching this video and we will see you in the next one bye [Music] you

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Views: 568,172

Rating: 4.9244757 out of 5

Keywords: Garden, Answer, Laura, Flower, gardening, gardener, beautiful, succulents, diy, grow, green, Proven, Winners, Fall, Winter, summer, spring, plant, planting, growing, plants, succulent, shrubs, shrub, bush, soil, dirt, earth

Id: lCPaEhDEuBc

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019