Trick Tomatoes for More Fruit...

today me and tuck are going to show you how to trick tomatoes to produce more fruit and less leaves let's go me and Tuck have been growing tomatoes for over 12 years now throughout that time we have developed a few interesting ways of forcing Our tomato plants to focus their attention on the production of lots of fruit that ripen early grow huge and continue to produce late in the season here is an indeterminate tomato plant it grows like a Vine similar to a cucumber this will continue to grow and produce all season until either a disease or a frost kills it if I didn't tie and stake this tomato plant it would sprawl along the ground and get bushy this is another indeterminate tomato plant this one I didn't stake up you'll notice this thing has a lot of tops or growth points on it so originally the first top was this one a top is like where the leaves unfold from so the leaves will unfold and it'll continue to grow from here and then if you look this way over here here's another top it's shot out and the leaves are unfolding so everywhere on tomato plants where a leaf meets the stem you're going to have this top grow this is what we call suckers on tomato plants and this sucker will grow in the same way a whole tomato plant will so it's almost like there's a tomato plant growing out of the plant you already growing see if you notice this right here this thing is going to grow just like a regular tomato plant would and then between each in the crotch right here between the stem and the leaf another sucker will grow almost like a whole another tomato plant at first you would think this is great because that's going to be a lot of fruit but when it comes to your tomato plants less leaves and less tops have some major advantages you will notice I have 20 tomato plants in 20 square feet when I tie and prune my tomato plants like this they only take up one square foot each because I'm growing them vertically also when I prune my plants like I'm going to show you how I do it right now they have less chances of getting disease issues because they have better air flow and better light penetration also the plants have a better more equal distribution of leaves fruits and Roots which leads to healthier more productive plants let me show you how I prune my tomato plants we're going to start with the most basic version then after you know the basic version I'll teach you how to break the rules and get into a more advanced form of pruning your tomato plants this tomato you'll notice at the top has one top unfolding this is forming that whole main stem so the basic version of printing your Tomatoes would be to go around and remove all of these suckers so the sucker again is growing between the leaf and the crotch of the tomato if we allow it to grow all of a sudden it would be like instead of having one main stem you start having a bunch of different stems because it's like a whole tomato planted growing out of this one so in the most basic version we want this to grow up one single stem and have one top so we'll go through and remove these young suckers it's best to do it when they're young because it's less stress in the plant and you could just pop it off with your fingers even this one is young enough to just pop this off right with our hands and this one over here we'll just pop this off just like this when it comes down to it a tomato plant that only has one top when you think about it it's going to have way less stress and it can actually produce fruit uh better and that fruit will ripen 2 weeks earlier because this plant has a whole root system to just support that one top so it can focus all of its attention on the production of those tomatoes and also the ripening of those Tomatoes leading to less stress and a healthier plant as opposed to a tomato plant that we don't prune like you see here if we let this thing sprawl all of a sudden it's going to start shooting tops out of everywhere so basically this tomato plant will have like 20 Tops on it if we let all the suckers grow it'll almost be like 20 tomato plants being supported by one root system as opposed to what I have in my trellis where there's 20 tomato plants that are all supported by their own root system if we allow this thing to grow all these tops like I said end up with about 20 tops it's going to be stress on the plant and also the tomatoes are going to ripen much slower because you have like the equivalent of 20 tomato plants being ripened by only one root system let me bring you over to my other plants now and show you the more advanced version of how I prune my tomatoes me and Tuck grabbed some gear that we're going to be using for pruning our Tomatoes we also want to mention that we have some new gear out on the website we've got the new merch the team grow Merch this one is really cool it's got this emblem in the front and the back is awesome I'll give you a clip of what it looks like there's all different little features that are handdrawn and specific to the channel I think it looks awesome there's also a version of the shirt where the design is on the front too but let's get into our pruning we've also got some isopropyl alcohol here some 70% I'm going to use this to clean my pruners between going from one plant to the next we don't want to be sharing any diseases so if one of our plants has a disease issue we don't want to share that with the next one so we're going to be using some some isopropyl alcohol in a sprayer and then just I'm going to spray it on the pruners from when I go from one plant to the next Plant I like these small pruners for when I need to make small cuts and I have these big pruners for when and if I need to make big cuts let's get over to the plants to start out we'll start on this plant right here the first thing we're going to do is remove the lower leaves and you want to do this for either indeterminate or your determinate bushy varieties so we want to make sure that we're removing these lower leaves because the leaves that are low if they get in contact with the soil then they could get some disease issues from the soil and then they could spread that up the plant so I'm going to go through and remove a lot of these lower leaves you can see what the plant looks like now we'll just take off a lot of these leaves all these down here this will also help increase the air flow and I'll cut this one back right here you can see how much that opened up the plant there we I'll go through and do this with all my plants in this whole entire trellis the next thing we want to do is if you're going to grow up a single stem which you can if you want to you would go through and remove all these small little suckers but now we're talking about the more advanced version of pruning so we're not going to remove every single sucker what we can do is we can allow some of these suckers for instance this one right here to so we'll start with one main stem you'll see it grown up here we'll allow some of these suckers to actually fruit and produce flowers like you'll see right here after this produces flowers and grows a little bit I will cut it back after the flowers and then I will remove all the additional suckers that come off this one sucker so it's like I'm only allowing this this sucker to Just Produce the flowers and remove everything else from it this will increase our overall Harvest because it will make the plant produce more fruit fruit which is uh kind of what we want another thing you could do is you could if you want allow the plan to produce like two main suckers or a few extra suckers just to help increase production but also to help shade the plant out especially if you live in the south so if you live in the south and the hot sun like comes in the summer you don't want to remove every single sucker or the plant will be a little bit bare and then the sun will just beat down on that fruit and cause Sun scold it's basically sunburn on your tomatoes so you could leave a few suckers in the center to help shade the bottom of the plants overall though the idea is to really have that one main stem to have the plant grow up and remove some of the suckers on the inside let me show you how I would remove uh some bigger suckers come over here like I talked about earlier getting the suckers while they're small is the most ideal but if I was to just like say let me find a one to cut if I cut I don't want to cut this one because I want the fruit from it but if I was to cut like a sucker like you see here we'll just say I I'll remove the fruit on this one just to show you if I was to cut this sucker here I would cut it down right where it meets the where it meets the stem right here and the cool thing about the isopropyl alcohol is it almost like cauterizes the wound and it allows it to heal a lot better it also again prevents diseases from being spread so this is kind of like a more advanced version of printing your tomatoes in its most basic form leave one uh leave one top and just continue to tie it up the tomato plant also when the tomato plant continues to grow up and say you have a spot here like this is where our first fruit is right let me just let me just clean my pruner so I don't make a mistake so I'm going to clean this right here if I was to prune this tomato plant I would remove all these lower leaves first this Leaf here this Leaf here this Leaf in the back and even I could even leave remove this Leaf if I want and we could REM remove most of the leaves until it gets to the first set of fruit we don't want to really start removing leaves above this fruit set because we need some of these leaves in order to taking some sun photosynthesize and be able to support some of this fruit when this fruit finishes though and the Tomato continues to grow up up and up and this fruit's done then we can remove some of these leaves so it's this whole idea of balancing out the amount of leaves you have with the amount of fruit you have also balance with the size of the root system so that's why you can leave some extra fruit on these plants because if it's only you're only going to leave one or two tops you have this whole root system to support the plant so when it comes down to it this way of printing Tomatoes it allows them to ripen quick they get massive and they also will produce late into the season because you're going to be avoiding so many disease issues by getting giving them good air flow good light and allowing the plants to have less stress on them because they're not supporting like again it's not like one root system supporting 20 plants it's one root system supporting one plant and with maybe a little extra fruit on it if you go with the advanced form of pruning your Tomatoes me and Tuck have a few more things we want to share with you as we walk down tomato alley I've got tomatoes growing on both sides fruit trees in the center with some blueberries but these tomatoes are going to do fantastic back here these ones I'm growing up steaks as you notice so a couple things I want to mention first off is if you haven't pruned your Tomatoes before and they're a little further ahead and you need to remove a lot of foliage just don't do that all at once or that could stress your tomato plant out a good amount do it over a 2-day period or 3-day period so with this tomato right here first I'm going to remove all these lower leaves after I cleaned my thing if you had a tomato that was far along like this this is how I would do it I'm going to remove the sucker and those extra leaves down there just like this you'll notice and then I would take this out as well and then this one here that would probably be what I would do for the first day or so and then let the plant adjust I also like pruning on a hot day where it's dry because these are going to be open wounds for a short period of time just make sure you don't do it when it's like raining out cuz that could just big have a bigger chance of letting diseases in another thing you could do is you'll notice this plant I have two main Tops on this one instead of just one main stem I'm doing this because I'm growing them up a steak and these plants have more space so it's like I'm basically growing two tomato plants up a single stake instead of just growing one plant this will increase my overall yield I don't do this in my tomato trellis area because I the that stuff is such Close Quarters it grows a lot better up a single stem and then I could do that advanced thing where I showed you where I'm just like allowing some of the suckers to fruit and then I'm removing everything else so this tomato plant right here will grow up those two SS it'll do really well and I won't go back and do any more pruning that's necessary until about a day or two because we don't want to overly stress this plant out swing to your left really quick you'll notice the boss is on the peas he's found the peas I'm just trying to work over here and he was working this morning so needs a quick snack what do you think boy want to want a pee or something Buddy he likes these yellow ones they're pretty dang good right boy yeah spam some hearts down low if you love seeing the young king in the videos this guy's always out here he's always working hard and he needs a little pay for all the labor he's putting in right Boo there are a few additional things me and Tuck want to mention that we know will help with your overall plant health and also the production the first one is to make sure you top dress with some allpurpose fertilizer and the addition of something like a bone meal will help too this is high in phosphorus which helps the plant in flower production and also fruit production you want to make sure you're giving it to them when they head into production because that's when there's a lot of stress in the plant and we need to support these plants so they can Thrive another thing is you want to make sure that you have a thick mulch down around your plants this will really help retain the moisture put less stress in the plants and also it will keep the so soil cooler which is important you also when watering want to make sure that you're only watering the plants at the base you don't want to spray the plants with water or that could really just create a scenario where there's a lot of disease light and airflow are the enemy of disease wet plants that really brings in a lot of disease and fungal issues look at this guy over here hanging out in the shade can't forget to mention him the last thing I want to mention is you want to focus and be mindful in getting good varieties of tomatoes and try some hybrids too this variety right here is one I've always grown I love it this is the saki tomato it's an heirloom variety it grows well but you can already see at the bottom there are some little issues it's getting we'll make sure to remove these so they don't move up the plant but you want to grow some varieties that have very good disease resistance like the mountain magic tomato or the lemon boy those things are so resistant so easy to grow you don't have to worry about managing disease with them so just make sure you're growing some hybrid varieties that will continue to produce later in the season this saki will do good for me but come like September even October some of those super reli reliable varieties like the mountain magic the super sweet 100 the lemon boy will continue to produce when the late light comes so it's a good idea to get some of the hybrid varieties in the ground that's today's video Growers thanks for watching we hope you enjoy enjoyed it we hope you got something out of it me and T had a blast out here we hope that you got some value out of this video and we wanted to try to open your mind to different ways of pruning tomatoes you can go that basic route like we've showed but if you can kind of understand the basics like I shared with you maybe you could kind of break the rules and make the natural growth of the Tomato work for you more instead of kind of fighting against all the suckers you could adopt them into your like uh style and they'll actually help you grow more fruit me and Tuck wanted to mention a thank you to one of our new channel members Elizabeth Burman thanks for being a part of Team grow thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here we also want to mention again to check out the new merch at team. us join the team be part of the team and grab your team grow sh we're really proud of the way that they came out let me turn around one more time just to show you guys the back of it we think they're really cool and there's so many unique little things specific to the channel and we're just really happy with how they look and it's a it's a it's something that we really enjoy we had a blast I mean I know I've showed him a bunch of times but it's he deserves all the screen time he's the leader of the channel he's the young king he's the boss we wouldn't be out here if it wasn't for this guy he's always encouraging us to get out get out here always inspiring us and me and Tuck hope that between the two of us we've encouraged and inspired you to get out get some Tomatoes planted do a little bit of pruning increase your harvests so you can be pulling in and eating those fresh tomatoes right off the vine there's nothing like it tuck and James will back be back to you again real soon we out

Channel: The Gardening Channel With James Prigioni

Views: 152,844

Keywords:

Id: NdynDggG5tc

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2024