I try to remove all suckers early but some elude me. Typically suckers are straight forward to identify. They grow from the axil, the point where a branch emerges from the stem. However, some just don’t follow that pattern. How to identify those less obvious suckers?
by abdul10000
10 Comments
Those aren’t suckers, they’re vines. You can let them all grow or prune to one or two leaders.
When you miss some and they’ve gotten big, the one that doesn’t have a flower truss coming off the stem before the first pair of leaves would be the side-shoot (sucker).
Don’t worry about them. They bring more photosynthesis into the plans & roots. 🙂
Once a sucker is past pinching size it will have a subtle mounded shoulder or a hump where they come out of the stem.
I think suckers act just like the main stem and you can remove them, put them in water and they will sprout roots. I like to prune off anything I cannot provide support for.
Looks like you’re growing indoors – can see a pot in 1 of the pics and it looks small. Also, there is quite a space in between branches up the vine which suggests the plant might be reaching for light and leggy. Are these under a proper grow light?
I stopped trimming suckers about 20yrs ago.
I’ve grown a few tomatoes that grew some less obvious suckers. If I’m unsure, I just let them grow a bit and then decide if it fits the structure I’m creating for my string trellising or wait to see if it starts a flower cluster. If it works, it stays; if it doesn’t, I snip it off. I don’t think the plant diverts huge amounts of energy growing one or two suckers so it doesn’t hurt to wait a bit to decide. I usually pinch the obvious ones when they’re quite small so most of the energy is still growing where I want it to.
Dont remove all sucker. Best to leave 3 suckers. They produce fruits too.
Can’t be bothered to worry about suckers.
Easy 100% foolproof way: Know what leaf nodes look like.
Leaf nodes have multiple individual leaves each. **Entire leaf nodes will only grow out of the main stem and its suckers**. That’s it (as a general rule, anyway…. because there are always those crazy varieties that want to grow leaf nodes on flower trusses or grow like 2 individual leaves on the main stem, or grow a sucker AND an individual leaf on an axil 45 degrees — but you’ll recognize those weirdos when you see them). **It doesn’t matter where your sucker starts growing out — on axils, near the base of the plant, right next to the growth tip, wherever — if you’re observing it and it starts growing its own separate leaf nodes like a stem would, it’s a sucker.**
EDIT: On all 6 of your pictures, it looks like you’ve grown out a sucker that was once growing near the main stem’s growth tip, so it became a second stem that is now similar in thickness to the main stem. Early on, when the stem splits into two directions like this, the one that develops flower trusses first is the main stem because it was already maturing while the sucker was busy getting big and thick.