The best method for growing indeterminate tomatoes

the very best way to grow tomatoes in my opinion is what we call single stem pruning and what that is is we take an indeterminate tomato it has to be an indeterminate tomato indeterminate just means that it will continue to grow all season long and put out Tomatoes all season long until it's killed by either disease or a frost determinant you'll hear the term determinate tomato determinate tomato means that the plant will get to a set height it will put out all of its flowers and all of its tomatoes and then it will die so determinant means it gets to a determined height indeterminate means it continues to grow all season long because it continues to grow all season long for me the best way that I have found is to grow at single stem pruning and I'm using an eight foot steak here this is an eight foot post we have it about 18 inches in the ground so that that gives this tomato six and a half feet to go up now it'll actually get taller than that um as long as like blight doesn't take it out before it reaches that height because I have a really long growing season here in uh Southeastern North Carolina so single stem pruning just means this I'm gonna have a single main stem that I allow to go to flower and produce and set fruit so we see that this one this is an this is an Abe Lincoln tomato I really like this variety and you can see that we're already beginning to set little baby tomatoes along this but you can also see here is we need to pull out this is a sucker so if I allow this and you'll know that this is a sucker because it is in between this joint here so it's it we call it an armpit so if I allow this to continue to grow it will produce an entire tomato plant and we we don't want that we want to have one single main stem that the flowers come off of we don't want this if we allow this to grow it will we will get more tomatoes that way but they're going to be smaller and we're not going to be able to do the single stem pruning saving space in the garden tomatoes are space Hogs they will take up a ton a ton a ton of room so to do this the first thing I'm going to do is remove this sucker so that it doesn't have the ability to go into another tomato interestingly enough if I wanted to I could remove this sucker I could put the bottom of it in a glass of water and after a few days maybe up to a week I would see Roots begin to form at that point I could theoretically plant this sucker out and get an entirely new tomato plant if I wanted to do that right now I do not want to do that I have enough tomato plants I have a ton of volunteer tomatoes in my garden so I'm going to come really we should be using um pruners or or Snips to do this but I have scissors I cannot find my garden shears so I'm just going to cut this off right there and get rid of it now um I'm taking this is jute twine so you could use tomato clips you could use jute twine something that's kind of got some some give and we don't want to tie it up too tight because we don't want to cut off like we don't want to cut into the stem but I'm going to just tie this up you know what that one's a little short let me get a longer one so to stake this up I'm going to take this jute twine and I'm just going to tie it to the Post like so now this guy is getting a little big right we so we're going to go ahead and stake it up in another place a little bit higher up the plant so you want to do this every every I don't know maybe six inches or so just and like I said we're giving it some room because we want to be able to have the wind kind of come in and move it keep the the keep it nice and healthy not too tight against the post we have fruit beginning to set here so we obviously don't want that too close um maybe about right here it's probably good give it a little room to give it and that's all you do so we're just going to keep coming out here removing any suckers so let's see if we can find any more examples I don't think there's any more examples on this one oh right here I've already come up that way so right here is another sucker beginning to form we see it's it's in the elbow right it's in this joint so here's the main stem here's a here's the the stem that's coming off and right here is a sucker if we leave this it will develop into a whole other plant so we're going to go ahead and pinch that off same thing here see joint elbow armpit whatever you want to call it and here's that sucker forming right there so we're going to go ahead and pinch that guy off too and we're going to leave these and we're going to come back and we're just going to do this all the way up um all the way up the tomato the other thing that's really important about single stem pruning is we want to get a ton of airflow so I'm going to take off and we want to kind of keep the bottom part of this plant away from the ground because what will happen is it'll get disease it'll get you know there's more pest pressure so that the more we get it up off the ground the healthier this tomato is going to be so what what's best is if we take off the bottom um the bottom branches so I'm going to take it all the way up to about here and see we have we have plenty of room for airflow we have a lot of space between the ground and the Tomato so if it rains and water's splashing down we're not going to have Splash back on the leaves that will cause a lot of damage and disease so this way we keep our plants really really healthy so this is actually an example of a determinate tomato like I was talking about earlier determinate Tomatoes get to a set height they set all of their fruit and they die sometimes with determinate Tomatoes we can have a couple flushes a fruit set before it dies off but either way it's only going to get so big so in the case of a determinate tomato we are not going to do a single stem pruning if we were to do that we wouldn't actually get any fruit so for a determinate tomato we're just going to allow that to pretty much go the thing about determinate Tomatoes if we were going to prune them the the pruning that we would do would probably be this um we're actually going to do it right now because I want you to see there there's chicken feathers on my on my tomatoes but um if we were going to to prune a determinate tomato we're only going to prune what's on the very bottom um we don't want a lot of contact with the soil we want a lot of space between the soil here and the first sets of leaves so there's some little tiny leaves here I'm going to either cut them off or pull them off and I'm going to get some space between the like I said the first sets of leaves and the ground but all of the rest of this and see we're beginning this is this is a a cherry tomato type of cherry tomato so a small tomato variety so we're going to allow this just to continue to grow these are the only ones determinate Tomatoes or dwarf tomatoes are the only ones we're going to be able to use tomato cages for we try to use these for the indeterminate tomatoes there's just no point it's it's not strong enough it's not sturdy enough to be used for indeterminate tomatoes but determinate Tomatoes it will work fine thanks again for hanging out with me hanging out with me in my garden today I hope that your garden is filled with grace and that you're abundantly blessed we'll see you next time thanks bye

Channel: Gardens and Grace

Views: 24,093

Keywords: Tomatoes, Growing tomatoes, Indeterminate tomatoes, Single stem, Grow vegetables

Id: YXrWlPv70II

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023