I’ve done two sessions on trying to prune my tomato plants and anchoring them to the supports. I’ll do a third, and hopefully, last session in a few minutes. I’ll also sprinkle them with tomato food and they’ll get watered automatically by our repaired yard irrigation system tonight.
I was really intimidated by the idea of pruning my tomatoes. Sliced ripe tomatoes are one of our very favorite things in the world. We look forward to planting and harvesting tomatoes every year. I have always just staked them, fed them, and then let the plants do what they want. We end up with a ‘mess,’ each year, with the vines climbing all over everything, making it impossible for my husband to mow near them and almost impossible for me to reach in and grab ripe tomatoes by the end of the season.
This year I was determined to try to learn to prune the tomatoes. I found a video on pruning tomatoes to increase yields that sounded good. The guy on the video seems understanding, patient, and knew what he was doing.
The first thing he talked about was ‘determinate’ vs ‘indeterminate’ tomato plants. I didn’t realize there were two types of plants, so I was already intimidated. I finally decided that I was dealing with ‘IN-determinate plants, since mine just kept growing, spilling all over the place until they froze at the end of the season.
I’ve watched the video over and over, because it scared me to death to even THINK about cutting off parts of the plants (other than dead stuff or broken branches.) I was (and still AM, to be honest) worried that something I do will cause the plants NOT to produce, but I’m determined to do it this year.
The first time I looked at the plants, before I was sick for about a week, I chickened out. Yesterday, I did two short sessions. Amazingly, I SAW the suckers! I carefully pruned those, plus cleaned up the remaining plants a bit in the smaller, square ‘niche’ planter beside the house. I got the plants tied up, anchored to the supports nicely.
I pruned one plant in the other planter before the wind started to threaten to pull me off my stool. I’ll go out to finish up, but – IF this works, I’ll be the happiest lady on the planet! There won’t be anything in particular to show you at this point, but I’m feeling really hopeful that I can encourage more TOMATOES rather than so many rope-y, messy vines this season.
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