Dale is a genius!!! LOL. 😂😂😂😂. He just tickles me to death with all that cuteness. ❤❤❤❤

😂 today was the time I had to prune today. 😢

you're the one that is wrong regarding not pruning the suckers. Yes you get more flowers, yes you get more unripe tomatoes, but at the end of the season, your total production will be crappier, because the plant cannot support that many and ripen them before the season ends. That or the fruit will be quite smaller... Single stem and getting many kilo's of tomatoes from a single plant, good size etc.

This video from the guy who whinges all the time about disease and varmint pressure. I prune my tomatoes so that they get air, and whenever I don't do that, the plants get sick and I get ZERO harvest. Don't be greedy, cause only healthy plants produce well. I need to force myself to prune a LOT, just because I experienced the problems when I don't. 3sq ft? Planted "no prune" "wild" tomatoes a few years back. Covered 9sq ft each. A second attempt with pruning two years later yielded far better results. Beefsteaks: I prune weak suckers because they will break under the fruit's weight anyhow. Got a new variety this year: Less than 5ft tall plant, lower half hangs full, the flowers at the top all turn brown. And soon it is time to prune flowers cause the fruit won't grow before first frost anyhow. I got the brown rot. If I remove brown leafs right at the start, it remains manageable. Whenever I am lazy, it spreads rapidly, infects the stems and fruits and I lose my harvest. Removing dieased leafs is NECESSARY. TY.

TL, DR: You cry about disease pressure, but if I treated my plants like you, I would get zero harvest. I need to prune intensively, cause whenever I was lazy, I experienced massive problems both with brown rot, wilt, and even some vermins that ate my fruits (and I got only brown leftover crumbs underneath my plants).

the other part of this is basically instead of having a second stem come from that same plant and root system, you can still have a second stem there, just growing from a second plant/root system. you'll get more roots faster that way than if you had a single plant try to expand into all that root space. so overall it's more fruit per square foot to do single stems.

@@jjbasson exactly

I don’t prune suckers and my fruits are huge. I think pruning to single stem started with professional growers because that was staking method that became popular and prevents fungal diseases. But they also plant way more tomato plants. When you don’t single stem you need to give indeterminates 3-4 feet of space. Single stem only really needs 12”. And you can pack the plants in.

This year was my first year where I didn't prune suckers off. I got a bad case of poison ivy that kept me out of the garden for several weeks and so by the time I went back to the garden, the suckers and plants were out of control....lol. Now, I'm at the point where I have a ton of tomatoes, but only the first ones on the vine are a good size, the rest are smaller. I was wondering if it was from not pruning suckers and all the leaves sucking energy from the plant, or whether some of the plants cross bred with my cherry tomatoes (not sure if that's even possible). I'm disappointed that the tomatoes are small, now they are ripening up and need to be picked, but not really sandwich slice size. I think next year I will go back to removing a good amount of suckers. I grow them with vertical support, so I usually put them closer together anyway.

@@ashdav9980 yes the new growth pulls the energy away from the current fruit development. I did the straw bale method this year and have had amazing results. 5 bales, I bought Bale Buster off of Amazon for prepping the bales.

likewise

But if you let the plant go without removing any suckers for say the first 2 feet of vertical growth, then the plant grows slower and makes a bigger stalk. I also wait to stake them for a while so the main stem gets really thick, esp here on the florida coast with constant wind. But at around 2 ft tall I start pruning suckers selectively. If you prune and stake from the start you get lanky flimsy vines because the plant keeps pushing vertically and relies on the stake for support.

I like to encourage a giant root system in the beginning by loosening the soil down 2 ft or more and creating a hole about that size. I pack it full of peat, manure, compost and perlite.. my plants get enormous with huge yields. Four or five foot square beasts. But I am doing this with a variety like 'fourth of July'. I trim to get air flow and keep leaves off the ground. Fertilize regularly of course. I use cages and sometimes need stakes as the sucker branches grow large. Never thought to try another way though it would be interesting to do both methods and compare outcomes.

@@ReapingTheHarvest exactly..!

​@ReapingTheHarvest, thank you. This makes sense and explains my really tall weak plants last summer!!

That’s why it’s called a sucker, it is stronger at sucking up the needed nutrients to make flowers, hence tomatoes. I do it sort of 50/50. Some suckers get pinched off while others I remove the lower stem as you do… guess it depends on the looks of each, which looks stronger and the location also. My neighbor said there had to be a balance of leaves to flowers, because too few leaves couldn’t provide enough energy to make enough flowers, or ripen the resulting tomatoes. Too many leaves use up all the nutrients and few flowers result or flowers are covered by leaves and cannot be pollinated by bees. It’s all about balance 👩🏼‍🌾!

I am same way I just let them grow and get a butt load of maters!

this is how i do it as well. I still trim off branches for airflow that arent suckers but the sucker branches themselves stay on the plant. Which in turn branches off that will also get pruned.

Me too!

Do the suckers then have enough time to grow to a large enough plant to produce tomatoes? I’m new at this

@@its.me.charlotteI guess it depends on the length of your growing Season. Here I’m still harvesting tomatoes in November! I hope that helps! All the best for a bountiful crop!

Same

Thank you so much for being a great vessel of knowledge and spilling it upon us!!! I, as many many others have learned a lot from you! I may be opening my mouth and "removing all doubt" of my stupidity, but here goes. 😂 With the coming of first fall frost I would think pruning suckers in late summer or early fall (in cooler climates) when new suckers WONT have time to grow AND produce would allow more energy to the established plant in the "end of season" crunch. I just think it could be another factor in deciding TO prune.

@@davidlaughlin5715this is true. It depends on climate very much of what to prune out. Colder climates don’t have a huge window to ripen tomatoes.

if thats the case wtf have you been doing for 25 years? do you bang your head against a wall? This guy is funny but thats all he is

😊

Hey, could you kindly link the study?

same with the Myth of not growing corn and tomatos near each other .. corn worm and tomato worm are the same worm .

That is the biggest determining factor for me. I have a short growing season, so I give my plants fertilizer in the hole, then later worked into the ground to help them grow faster. I want those plants on speed to produce. If I lived in kalyfornia, it would of course be different. No frost dates to worry about either early or late in the season. All the time in the world to grow and experiment with/without suckers.

I haven't ever pruned my tomatoes but am considering it to focus nutrients into developing tomatoes before frost date in New England

Same here. Utah tomato grind 💪

Of course they do, but if you want a better quality and better size tomato you prune

You can still prune the suckers. Put them in water. After they root well, plant them. Then you have a head start from starting from a seed. Also you'll have later fruit from a new plant.

The suckers also start their fruit clusters after fewer leaves, compared to the central main vine. I think it's a decent compromise to leave some suckers in place but top the suckers so that they themselves don't vine out too far.

I always thought that pruning off some of the suckers was to root them for more plants.

I respect your experience, but commercial growers know how to garden to make money. Most of us are gardening to make our own food. It isn’t the same goal and certainly isn’t the same product. Especially when it comes to tomatoes. Ask anyone their opinion of store bought tomatoes anywhere in the world, it is the same answer. There is little tomato taste.

Same here

I take green tomatoes at the end of the year and can sliced dill green tomatoes. This is an excellent substitute for pickles. I found great recipes on the Internet.

The problem is that for a lot of growers, the season isn't long enough to do that

I do that too

I am in Florida and do this as well. Have a dozen friends that have tomato plants from my garden. Plants can be expensive. I have given away so many starter plants to friends of bananas, avocado, Papaya and others. Don’t charge for them, just have the satisfaction of introducing friends into gardening.

I end up having way too many young tomato plants from propagating the suckers. I mostly give them away, but by late summer, I caution adoptive parents that the vine won't have enough time outdoors to give them fruit. But if they can raise the plant indoors, they can get winter tomatoes. Over the winter, I grow my suckers, then propagate THEIR suckers. In this way, I keep the plant going and even if I don't take it to the fruiting stage, I have tomato plants ready to go into the garden come spring. Very useful for varieties I don't have seeds for, exceptional varieties, expensive varieties, and hybrids.

Our familes were farmers and tomatoes were just tomatoes and were never staked or realized. They grew randomly in the ground. We had garden space to not worry about it. I was too young to know about diseases or pests but we always had plenty to eat and can.

Pruning the suckers isn't for more tomatoes, its for higher quality fruit and you start to get fruit earlier as the plant isnt wasting energy on suckers.

james, all this talk about cutting back and pinching is so unnecessary. I agree with you I just let mine grow unless I see a limb touching the ground.

Thx! I was afraid I’d ‘ruined’ mine by not removing the suckers. 😊

You should not listen to this guy, this is really bad advice.... while you may not want to prune all of them off doing so will definitely result in better tasting and bigger tomatoes.

It depends on what kind of tomatoes you have

Prune early and root them. More plants

Same!

​@@gamerclownz2783quit pushing this myth. Its simply not true.

There are so many different great types. Growing a diverse selection is key.

I watch the one channel here where the family grows commercially and the hundreds of tomato plants just lay in the field on the ground and vine out uncontrolled just like mother nature would do. Thousands of tomatoes without all the coddling and work.

@@afriendtoo6971 Yes, that is one way of doing it. But that method will not be the best in all climates and with all varieties. For example, I know there are Italians who grow their semi-determinate sauce tomatoes like this - they just walk through and harvest lots of tomatoes in a short space of time, and don't care if the plants are dying. But if you have a wetter growing season you might not get a crop before the fungal diseases destroy the plant, and if you grow indeterminate plants it will be very difficult to harvest (I've tried this - you don't even see half the fruit, let alone get to them). So if you want to grow them "wild" (without pruning) the best way is to buy or build a big tomato cage and grow them off the ground (see "the Tomato Man" - he grows them like this... he doesn't spray).

How about when they are 4-6’ tall

@@kerrydeshotels9691 Good question. I'd like to know, too. ~ Lisa

I did top mine when they got that tall because I didn’t know to do it earlier, so now, the suckers are too high for me to manage effectively, making my plant top heavy, and maybe not allowing as much time for fruit to develop as would have, if I had topped the plants earlier.

I'm 5 foot tall and I top them when I can't reach them easily anymore. I find if they are allowed to keep growing taller, those fruits get smaller and less desirable as the plant seem "spent" and out of energy by that point, and it's too late in the season to grown them big anyway.

This, it only works if you control the overall plant growth.

Try clean light daily to control blight but must prune commercial style.

I'm trying this ,this year Thanks for sharing ❤

I literally need you to give me a lesson. My dad grew but never taught me...I have no idea now, just started my first 2 and think I need more ...equipment.?

Cherry tomatoes with grow in a hat.

There should be no official way on how to prune and indeterminate tomato, because every gardener has different needs, growing season length, weather, etc. The idea that there is a "best way" is not true. Pruning is usually necessary to a degree, even if it's only to manage the plants, but it should be done carefully and with good reasoning.

Totally agree ❤

This vid is 9 mo old. Maybe you will see this 😊 please tell me if you can, with indeterminate what about stunting the height to no more than 4’? I have no way to support very tall ones. Any tips?

Yes an inverted cage on top of the cage

​@@Montanafelines You can top the vine at whatever height suits you. There's no point in letting the vine grow out beyond what you can reach or what your supports can manage. But I think if you are going to top a vine in the early or mid-season, you may want to allow a couple suckers/laterals further down to make up for cutting off your main vine's vertical potential.

It's 100% the shade cloth and straw bales. Getting the plants out of my native soil and under shade has made *all* the difference. If you live in the South, growing under shade cloth is mandatory as far as I'm concerned.

@@TheMillennialGardenerlol, I’m in Z5a, WI and have shade cloth over tomatoes. It’s Hot here. Don’t forget about microclimates. We just had 101*F and many high 90*F days. We had been in extreme drought also and the shade was necessary.

Fantastic video! I plan on following your advice regarding pruning my tomato plants. Greetings from Greenville, NC. You mentioned shade cloth, what is it and how do you use it. It gets extremely hot here from mid June to end of August. The heat stresses the hell out of my tomato plants. Thanks again for an awesome video.@@TheMillennialGardener

@@highwayroadrunner206 Haha, this just keeps getting more absurd. I thought it was annoying I had to put up a trellis, now I'm supposed to be erecting a fucking tent (that is also 100% prohibited in my neighborhood). Not happening. I live minutes from MG. If he's right I guess I can't grow tomatoes.

❤😂😂😂❤​@@Maspets

I'm glad you're enjoying the content. Please note that with my beefsteak tomatoes, I still do and will continue to pinch off some suckers here and there. However, that's because they will get too unruly and I will run out of means to support them. If you can only support a certain number of main stems, you will need to pinch off suckers to control them. However, there is no biological reason to remove suckers, so if you can support the tomato plants, you don't have to touch them. Removing suckers won't make them fruit more. It will make them fruit less.

@@TheMillennialGardener got it! Thanks again 😊

You'll end up with smaller fruits if you let the suckers grow. If quantity is more important to you than quality, go ahead and let the suckers grow.

I think the "whole story" is to "manage" your plants as you've stated. One person indicated they prune until the base stem is strong, and then let-er-go from there unless unmanageable. I think conscious effort produces the best results.

​@@TheGreenAcreWIyour statement is completely untrue. That is simply a myth. Not pruning suckers and thus growing a big plant does not compromise size or quality of the fruit.

Yeah and that results in keeping 1 to 3 stems and removing everything else in my opinion..

@@SeamusHarper1234 I actually keep as many as I feel the plant and cage can support. For cherry maters, it is a lot more. For beefsteaks, usually 4-5 depending on stuff.

Yup, leave too many suckers and your plant will get out of control.

I prune this way too. Shaded sun leaves must go, and all suckers must stay.

agreed. i got a (edit: -Baby- ) Better Bush tomato plant this year and i have trimmed out so many leaves....and it is loaded. i have to re-inforce the infrastructure this weekend. it gets humid here, and as soon as a leaf starts getting nasty i get rid of it. always have tomatoes to give away.

What is a sun leaf please?

@@bobbiduval7961 Its a side stem that only has leaves for photosynthesis. Not a sucker or flower cluster.

That is exactly what I do and harvested and canned 342 lbs of tomatoes last year from 20 plants. 😂

I am keeping one plant with sucker, and that plant has more flowers. I think it's better to allow one or two sucker's to grow. We should take middle path.

You can't generalize all tomatoe genetics into one group. Did you listen to the whole videos? Semi determinate tomatoes, determinate tomatoes. Indeterminate tomatoes, semi Indeterminate tomatoes. LISTEN WITH YOU EARS @JEANSROSES7249. Your the type of person to interrupt the person you asked a question in the middle of getting ur answers with your own answers

Also depends how long your growing season is, leaving them on may produce more flowers but if they don’t mature into ripe fruits you’re better concentrating on the single main stem and harvesting all the fruit produced.

@@davea.2311 thank you; good point

Both methods have their benefits! Pruning them you can have more plants closer together, you'll get less tomatoes per plant but more plants in the same place. Indeterminate plants can also get SO bushy and are prone to disease. Pruning will help.

I always leave the suckers and cut back the large stem below it by about 2/3. Have a huge harvest every year.

Thank you! It's been a fun ride getting to here. I can't explain why removing suckers became so popular. I think certain trends just catch fire, and then they become perpetuated on their own energy without a lot of thought behind them. It turns into an "Everybody knows that..." kind of situation. Always question conventional wisdom, because it often isn't vetted!

@@afriendtoo6971 Help me understand, please, what you mean by 'cut back the large stem below it.' What large stem do you mean? Thxvm. ~ Lisa

@@LB-vl3qn --- The one directly below the sucker. It looks like the sucker is growing out from it. You will notice it usually gets darker and the leaves thicker.

@@afriendtoo6971 Got it, thanks 🙂

Nature knows best. We are here to support her. Much love and good luck. ☮

I did the same

It doesn't mean you can't be successful. You can let them sucker out for the rest of the season. Keep in mind if you have a short season, single-stemming can lead to faster ripening fruits since you'll have less tomatoes overall. If you have a short season, the more tomatoes you have, the longer they'll take to ripen.

Same here! Thanks for this info!

Me too! I'm in Burgaw NC, so I will be listening to you more often.

Great video! I'm so glad I found your channel. I do this too. I actually take off the lower branches and just keep them pruned up for air flow. I have a question... should my Brussels have sprouts yet? I have big, beautiful healthy plants with no sprouts! 👏😅 please help me 🤷‍♀️💙🌿🍅

when i get blight or any other disease. I keep a couple sets of sheers and carry a bucket of bleach water and a rag and wipe them before each cut so it dont tranfer the disease to other plants or a different part of the plant. it works for me.

Yeah I love cherry tomatoes, but I would get tired of harvesting hundreds of them 😂

I am so with you! I like tomatoes but I need a managable plant too!

I am tired of harvesting now and it's only mid August! My cherry plant produced 500 ripe fruits before I stopped counting. Now I harvest and give them all to the local Food Bank. I was giving them to my neighbors but they have been avoiding me :) Being somewhat lazy, I only prune suckers that I notice. My plants are massive and I harvested more this year than ever before. I took 12 Big Beef and Ultra Girl weighing 8lb 12oz in one picking and i have taken at least 20 from each plant so far. Compared with my neighbors who prune, my harvest is many times larger.@@jessicawright4102

Ja but freeze the hundreds down, great for soup wintertime 😊

I agree. I don't even take home tomatoes for the most part. They are more like garden snacks. Vine to mouth.

Interesting! I've been removing suckers until my plants got SO big(I used to have a big garden, had to move, so now I only have a couple in containers that I can baby-sit almost daily). Sounds good, though! Let the suckers grow until they produce(flowers or toms), then snip the tops?

@@turtleman5111 That's how I do it! And then when my main stem(s) start to get too tall, I'll leave suckers from the bottom of the plant and let them become the main stem and trim back the original once it's been full harvested. Happy growing!

As long as your growing season is long enough that the suckers have time to grow, flower and fruit. If you don't see frost until late October, you probably will be OK.

That’s exactly what I do with pear/cherry tomatoes! Kept a random seedling from either Fourth of July of Early Girl last year and it did great and produced a ton of fruit the last two weeks of season, until the chickens got out and ate everything but the stems. I keep getting more and more cold/heat tolerant tomatoes every season, too. I have them popping up in my yard now and staying alive through the first several light frosts in spring and fall with zero intervention from March into December 🤯 no fruit at those early/late points but still super impressive! Took a hard 20*F freeze to finally kill them off all the way to the ground outside of the greenhouse.

Repentance and redemption. 😂

Any update as to how it eventually turned out? Thanks

Cut to the height you like. Mine are 6 feet in the greenhouse. 7 or 8 trusses on each.

I'm glad you're enjoying the channel! I'm an engineer, so my brain works kind of differently. Everything to me is a progression, like I'm writing a report in my mind 😅

@testticklehead Scientific? I don't see any sources on these videos.

Thank you! I'm really happy to hear you're enjoying the videos.

Good point. Dissenters keep pointing to the fact that commercial growers prune to a single stem, as if that magically justifies it for all growers. They are not considering that the real estate, objectives and priorities of commercial growers may not line up with those of individual gardeners.

No, I don’t wonder that at all

In fairness, many of the vegetables we grow have had the natural disease resistance bred out of them over generations of seed-saving to prize the recessive genes that produce the large fruits low in seeds. Also, we're growing this plants far away from their native habitats, and our locations are often overrun my invasive pests these days. That being said, less is often more. Giving them vertical infrastructure to stay off the ground and external fertilizers is a very good idea. Watching them for pests and spraying organic pesticides when necessary is a good idea. Hacking them to pieces often isn't.

Many old timers let's their tomatoes sprawl. My father planted 120 ever year and let them go. Deep straw mulch and 10bfeet apart Never pruned and ewe had so many tomatoes we could feed an army. Single stem came from commercial growers I grow mine up but keep as many suckers as I can

I don't wonder about that. I also don't wonder how abundant their crops were, although you seem to be starting with the assumption that our forebears grew massive quantities of quality fruit (which I highly doubt). I really think it's enough to compare one year to the previous and next and noting how different methods affect outcomes. That's how my agronomist father taught me. Every year, for each crop, there was a batch doing things the same old traditional way, a batch trying to replicate previous success, a batch trying to correct previous failures, a batch trying something new. I'm more like my dad and less like my fellow community gardeners in this regard; less about "this is how we've always done it," and more about "what if..." and "how can we better...?)...

There have been many experiments measuring yields of pruned vs unpruned. The yields are 3:1 unpruned to pruned. If you want to grow LARGE tomatoes you *can* prune, but even that isn't necessary.

Umm... Yeah, you can conduct your own experiments if you want to prove something to yourself and don't mind replicating other people's results (to which there is scientific merit). You can even post a vid of your results. You'll get a fair share of likes, I'm sure. Besides, he's not going against mainstream; just against a certain online stream of gardening pundits who can't even give the logical reasoning behind the received wisdom they are spewing as if it were their own ideas

I actually tried pruning the suckers last year, and my yield did decrease. This season I’m leaving them. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I grow cherry tomatoes predominantly and agree with you. If someone wanted BB tomatoes maybe I'd not prune.

He mentions this in the video, calm down gramps

All the commercial greenhouses grow single stems and they don't do anything that ruins their profits. Total fruit weight is higher on a single stem.

He was talking about determinate not indeterminate

@@MelAtlNP sick burn