This is my first season growing vegetables on my balcony. I have this Early Girl indeterminate which I am totally lost on how to prune. I’ve tried reading guides and watching videos but this seems so confusingly different than the videos I’ve watched.
I went on vacation for 2 weeks and came back and it has completely gotten to a point I don’t know what to prune and what to keep!
Any advice is appreciated.
by wattohhh
4 Comments
This is my method from doing countless hours of research. Just remember that everyone has their own method and opinion, so do what you feel’s right.
Dont listen to those people who say “grow tomatoes not leaves”. You NEED leaves to grow tomatoes, so you always want to prune as little as possible. While yes, tomatoes will use less energy on producing tomatoes if there are lots of leaves, using a lot of energy on keeping the plant alive; the goal of a tomato plant is to produce seeds, not leaves. The plant knows this, and is using the “excess” leaves to funnel energy into fruit production, it just doesn’t always happen at the right time. It’s much better to influence your plant with fertilizing than pruning, because you’re minimizing disease and pest exposure.
Don’t single stem unless you’re growing very close together. You want as many suckers as your infrastructure and pot size can handle (looks like maybe a 10 gallon pot, I’d recommend maximum 6 suckers, 3-4 would be better giving you 4-5 main stems). More suckers gives you more yield per pound, but overall smaller fruit. Before you do any pruning, get all the main stems where you want them. This means untangling them, orienting them the way that makes sense and pointing them upward, and ideally attaching them to your cage. Then you can start pruning. Prune any leaves at or below the soil surface. Then identify any flower clusters and prune any leaves that are touching and rubbing up against them (if the leaves can be oriented to not touch them, just move them.) Then prune any leaves that are touching and rubbing up against other leaves, once again, simply moving the leaves if possible. Ideally you want to be able to “see through” the plant. You want each leaf set, flower, and sucker to be completely open to the surrounding air.
Again, this is just my method and it is always better to take less than too much.
A note on the single stem method: single stemming is a 100% valid way of pruning tomatoes. You get easier to handle plants, save space, tomatoes are bigger, ripen faster, and are less susceptible to disease. I live in zone 10b, so I can afford to set tomatoes out extremely early in the winter and let them develop very slowly, but get overall larger plants with higher yields, albeit much smaller tomatoes. The method I described above is better for containers imo, because it is much easier to handle larger plants in containers and it’s not like it’s competing for space with anything else. If you want massive quick ripening fruit and easy to manage plants, prune prune prune prune prune. Just always make sure to do it when it’s hot and dry out to avoid disease exposure.
See this study for data regarding the harvest differences in different pruning levels: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=fvtrials
The reason you hear different things about pruning from different people is that they are all in unique situations and prioritizing different aspects of tomato cultivation. They are growing in different spaces, in different climates, different varieties – all of these things matter for when you decide to prune or not.
Put simply, pruning allows you to control the shape, size and density of the plant. In general, you should only prune as much as you need to because ultimately, a bigger plant will mean more flowers and assuming everything else goes well – more fruit.
If you are growing for the first time – don’t worry about getting things exactly right. Take careful notes on your results this year and adjust in subsequent years.
Valid reasons to prune:
* improve ventilation by reducing density
* constrain plant growth in a limited space environment
* constrain plant growth to existing support structures
* constrain plant growth because your container is small
* limit spread of existing disease
A piece of advice that I got that has served me well. It’s the fuzzy branches that grow the fruit. So when choosing what to prune opt for the smooth branches