Tomato Gardening| How to prune and stake your tomato plants for optimal growth.

what's up everybody today we're talking about gardening and more specifically tomato gardening we're going to be talking about staking your Tomatoes pruning them and all types of tomato goodness now already in these raised beds we do have some mature Tomatoes you can see we're right here at the beginning of June and I've already got ripe tomatoes ready for harvest these have been pruned on a little bit and we have staked them but over here in this bed I've got some younger Tomatoes that needs some attention this little guy here is already falling over so today I'm gonna be showing you how to stake these up prune them and all sorts of other tips stay tuned so there's a couple ways you can stake your Tomatoes I personally like to use these six foot oak steaks because tomato plants especially in determinate ones they grow very very tall that's why I don't use tomato cages although for determinate type tomatoes that only grow four or five feet the tomato cages work great now these younger tomatoes are about a couple feet tall now and so you know when the wind blows hard these things could easily lean over so now it's time to stake them up so what I do is about six inches behind the the root ball I go ahead and push one of these stakes in and this is the beauty of having a raised bed in a traditional garden you got to do a lot of hammering in a raised bed you just push the stake on down so now that you got your stake in the ground it's time to tie them up I personally use these little nylon strips just because they're soft and they don't cut into the tomato too hard and then you just want to kind of push your tomato back and I just do a thick almost like tying a shoe just do this a couple times I don't you know I don't tie it too hard I give that the main stalk a little room to grow and voila you'll do this about you know every time the tomato grows about eight inches to a foot you want to just keep doing this on up the steak okay I've got my materials ready it's time to knock out the rest of these it goes pretty quick [Music] now all these tomato plants through here are big beef which is an indeterminate type tomato so that means they're just going to keep growing and growing all season as a matter of fact they're eventually gonna outgrow these steaks and I'll probably have to put a steak on top of this steak especially in these lifted up raised beds I might even have to get a ladder to finish taking these alright so let's talk about pruning your Tomatoes I personally start pruning my Tomatoes when they're very young that way you know you don't just wreak a bunch of havoc after they've already matured you're not cutting off these big branches so I like to do them and they're very young and I'd do it for two reasons the first reason is it'll keep soil from splashing up on the leaves which will actually cause blight which is a disease that it will take out to your tomato later during the summer the second reason I prune my tomatoes is it puts more energy into the fruit instead of growing all this foliage because tomatoes will grow heavy heavy dense foliage throughout the season so in this particular plant I'm gonna start at the bottom these are what the old-timers call suckers and I just go ahead and cut all these off and I'll even prune off these lower limbs too so I'll just cut these and I'll going up to about I don't know maybe there and I'll actually you know you don't want to cut off your blooms because this is what's actually going to make the tomatoes so you want to leave those but as far as all these lower branches it's great to go ahead and prune them off we'll go ahead and go to this one this one has a lot of low growing foliage that I'm going to go ahead and clip off this doesn't hurt the tomato a lot of people are scared to do this but it doesn't bother the tomato at all and I'll even go up to about there on this one it looks kind of funny it looks kind of skinny and but trust me guys I've been doing this for years and pruning your Tomatoes will help your Tomatoes produce the biggest tomatoes you've ever seen [Music] another tip I'll give if you're growing tomatoes and raised beds or containers you almost have to water them daily especially when you have a hot day like today where's almost in the high 80s high humidity and you just want to just keep watering them in the traditional garden bed you might not have to water so much because the ground is gonna hold more moisture but in these beds especially the way I got them the water drains out really fast so water and often is a good idea make sure you hit the subscribe button in the notification bill that way you'll get updates every time we release and hate our family dog Jackson he would just love for you to hit that subscribe button and hate our family dog Jackson would love for you to hit that subscribe button and notification bill that way you'll be in the know about when we release a new video also I'd love for you to comment down below what you'd like to see next what do you want us to do a video about and in the meantime I'm just going to enjoy one of these juicy ripe homegrown Tomatoes

Channel: S&K Greenhouse

Views: 360,798

Keywords: garden, gardening, gardentips, raisedbeds, raisedbedgardening, pruning, staking, plants, plantcare, vegetablegardening, tomatoplants, tomatoes, vegetableplants, gardeningtips

Id: rTLdd51dRxk

Length: 6min 44sec (404 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020