Pruning Tomatoes & Cucumbers

hey there in today's video I'm going to show you how I prune my tomatoes and cucumbers so this is a pretty well requested video happy to share as most of my videos I like to have a disclaimer that there are many ways to do this this is just how I do it especially with tomatoes most growers get one maybe two chances a year to work on Tomatoes so it's one of those things that you learn a lot every year that you do it this is only my second season so let me show you how I go about doing each one so let's start with the indeterminate tomatoes alright so I'm growing indeterminate tomatoes in the greenhouse and it's really crowded in there so I just want to talk to you for a second before I head in there and show you some details I've been pruning these consistently since they've started growing and when they first start growing they just they grow so fast and you really got to stay on top of the pruning if you really want it to you probably go in there every day or two but for me it turns out to be every four or five days or maybe even a week and just stay on top of it really helps the plants growth and keep things under control so as I said these are indeterminate tomatoes and if you don't know the difference indeterminate tomatoes will just keep growing taller and taller and keep fruiting a lot of people will do this method will they they lower in lean so they have this ring tied up in a roll or something on top and as they grow they just lower it down the plant will just keep keep growing and keep fruiting but I'm doing a little bit differently here and as I said lots of ways to do things we're just going up to the top and once once they sort of get to the top and they run out of room and we're just going to terminate them at the top and that will force their energy down into the plant to try to produce more fruit the other kind of tomato that you can have is a determinate tomato and we don't grow many of those but we do have a few just for our personal garden so I'll show you those two so there are I would say two main things about pruning indeterminate tomatoes so let me show you those all right the first thing I want to do here is talk about what I've heard is called as hard pruning and so what you do is you just prune all of the branches at the bottom of the plant up and around the fruit sets and as the plant continues to fruit up higher you just keep pruning all the loot all the branches out around the fruit so you can see it looks kind of weird if you've never seen this you just all you see at the bottom of the plant are just you know all the tomatoes and this works great because it does a couple things one is that it keeps really good airflow around the base of the plant where you can have sort of fungal and other sort of issues so just keeps a lot of air moving around so you don't have a lot of foliage on the ground and keeping it wet keeps the plants nice and dry at the base which is great for Tomatoes the other thing is it allows the Sun lights really penetrate down into ripen the fruit a little faster so you can see here that like you know this fruit set here there's no there's no leaves around it which is which is what I want so like for example up here trying to just one-hand it but you see there's there's a fruit set there so I'm just gonna cut cut that guy off there and maybe this guy right here I that so you know it's not an exact science but you know you just want to trim out around them and you know as the as the plants grow up you'll just be pruning up higher and higher and it works out because there's foliage at the top so they're still able to photosynthesize alright so the other main thing you have to worry about when pruning is called a sucker and this is exactly what a sucker is you can see right here you have the main branch that goes up and this is a hep side branch here and this dude right here in the corner see this guy right here that's called the sucker and you want to make sure you prune those out now when they're small you can often just you know break them snap them off but I like to use these these guys here and just get a nice clean cut and that's it does you want to make sure you take off every sucker at any stage for indeterminate tomatoes that will cause the plant to continue to grow upwards and you know put the put the energy in the right place so make sure you stay on top of the suckers they can get huge so that's one of those things you just want to stay on top of so what determinate tomatoes is a little bit different I don't have a lot experience with these we're just growing a few this year for our family and so I can't really speak much about pre-determined Tomatoes there are some people that say that you shouldn't prune them at all I've read some recommendations that you can prune them a little bit and I think I'm going to prune them a little bit one thing that I've heard that is good is just to could not heavily prune them because they're not going to keep going they're going to get to a certain size right determinate right a determinant size so you don't want to prune them heavily because it'll really scent their growth and their ability to produce fruit so the thing that I'm going to do here which I haven't done yet is is pruning the suckers up until the first flowering set and then that's it you know because once again some certain size you want to just push out as much fruit as possible and you don't want to stump that growth by cutting things off so but one thing is you can see there's a lot of foliage around the base which makes me want to make sure I clear some of that out so that the airflow can get in here and keep the plant really healthy so again with determinants I'm going to prune all the suckers up into the first flowering point and that will be it okay so before we get into cucumbers I just want to talk about the tool that I'm using here I like these little pruners that have the really sharp tips on them you can get them that have a wider tip for cutting bigger stems but I like these because you can really you can really get in there they're really accurate these are made by DRAM I just picked these up recently I like a lot of the DRAM products I'm not sponsored by them or anything it's just uh I use a lot of their watering lawns and stuff like that so I'll leave a link for this in the description if you guys are interested they're pretty inexpensive it was like 13 bucks and you know I bought the ones that like Lowe's or Home Depot and they last like a month and fall apart these are very heavy-duty and they're stainless steel so anyways I like these and I like the I like the really accurate really small ones because you can really just get in there and get those little suckers out so all right with cucumbers they as if any of you guys ever grown cucumbers you know how crazy and out of control they can get so quickly so you should really stay on top with the pruning with these guys to get to control them and then to you know make sure that they're going where you want and fruiting as best as possible a lot of methods in pruning cucumbers I've seen some really cool ones JM forty he's got a really cool one he calls the umbrella trellising and he goes up and then over and then has the plants come down with huge yields it's a little more involved so I'm just gonna keep really simple I'm just have the plants go up and then go back down so let me show you the basics of cucumber trellising because I think it's a little bit more a little different than Tomatoes all right so to understand cucumber trellising we have to talk you know how the plant really is put together here and you got to recognize each no and the note is where all the business goes down on the plant that's where all the connections are so take a look at the node you'll see there's a main stem coming up and it means them going out the top and at every node you're going to have a couple different things going on you're going to have a fruit so you can see the little cucumber here with the flower or the flowers gone you're gonna have a tendril and these is what they used to grab onto stuff you're gonna have one leaf into the one leaf and then you have another thing coming out right here this is the sucker the other thing and you can see that the sucker turns into a whole nother plant with a lot more business so I'm gonna make sure that I take off that sucker and this one's a little overdue I've been behind on pruning and that will keep the plant nice and clean and keep the energy going in the right direction and so that's how you prune cucumbers pretty straightforward this is what it's all about so I just wanna give you guys another resource here this book is awesome Andrew Mefford is just an amazing author and just a really knowledgeable dude I am not sponsored by Andrew or this publisher anything like that but this book's been awesome Andrew also just came out with a new book called the organic no-till revolution something like that I haven't read it yet but I've heard amazing things this is books all about greenhouse production and you know what even if you don't have a greenhouse or a high tunnel there's a lot of really cool information here not a super expensive book I will leave a link in the description below there's a lot of stuff about pruning in here growing all different crops for tunnel high tunnel production or greenhouse production so yeah if you're interested in this stuff and you want a little more in-depth knowledge yeah I'd recommend checking this book out one last thing about cucumber pruning is just be careful go slow last year I was rushing at some points and I would cut the wrong one and then cut the main stem instead of a sucker so just really pay attention they started to get really intertwined you got to make sure you're following and just paying attention so you don't do that anyways um a lot of you guys have probably seen my video about this trellis I'll put a link up there so you guys can check it out just an update it's holding up the pipe bending a little bit but it's still holding if you are worried about the weight on this sort of trellis system feel free to use larger conduit this is half-inch you could use 3/4 or you could just put more posts in more often and it'll hold it up to but so far so good now I if you haven't seen if you can see my last video please check that one out ooh talk about my background and the story here on the farm and what I'm gonna do with the channel but you know a lot of this information that get is just from other people so for example this trellis idea was from Conner Creek more never sink farm an amazing farmer and just just check out all his stuff - he's just man his farm is incredible and then like the the trellising idea with the bamboo with the twine from curtis stone so you know it's stuff that i just take from all different places and hopefully you guys will take some of this information and apply it in your in your farm or your garden and and share with other people that's the whole idea here so yeah I got a long list of topics that you guys have recommended and I appreciate that immensely I only have time to do so many videos a week and I'm trying to squeeze them in amongst farming this farm is a one-man show at the moment so I'm not just farming harvesting marketing selling running the business all that stuff but I also have two kids and a wife I'm trying to squeeze everything in so I appreciate all of the feedback and interaction with everyone it's been awesome and I'll keep making these videos for you guys and please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already like the video share with your friends we got to get information out to as many people as possible thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Sattin

Views: 248,498

Rating: 4.8969517 out of 5

Keywords: farming, farming for profit, farming business, micro farming, urban farming, urban micro farming, urban farmer, regenerative farming, regenerative agriculture, sustainable farming, sustainable agriculture, no till farming, no till garden, no-till gardening, no-till farming, organic farming, organic vegetable gardening, market gardening, market gardening for profit, suburban farming, suburban farmer, permaculture, homestead, homesteading

Id: w5S0qLVLU_4

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019