In years past, our tomato-growing technique consisted of two steps: 1) put plants in ground, then 2) pick ripe fruit. And for the most part, this has worked out ok. We’ve enjoyed lots of fresh, juicy tomatoes! But this year, I decided to try something new: pruning.

After last year’s jungle-like tomato plants, it just seemed like there must be a way to divert some of the energy that went into growing and maintaining the prolific foliage into producing larger and more abundant fruit. After reading this page and a few others, I set out to implement a regimen of what’s known as “simple pruning” (as opposed to “Missouri pruning”). Basically, by learning just a little about the structure of tomato plants, I’ve been able to limit the number of branch stems on this year’s plants. Doing so has the effect of concentrating the sugar available for fruit production. You have to leave enough foliage for the purposes of photosynthesis and shading the developing fruit, but that doesn’t take as much as the plant will grow naturally.

One specific recommendation was to only allow a second stem to form above the first fruit truss. This gives the fruit on that lowest truss maximum access to the sugars moving up the main stem. The result thus far has been nothing short of astounding. The picture shown here is an example of such fruit. And in general, we have more fruit on the plants (than this time last year) and significantly larger fruit than ever before on all three types of plants (Big Beef, Early Girl, and Sweet Million cherry). Tomato pruning — it’s a good thing!

We’re also experimenting with two different staking/caging methods. Three of our plants are in homemade cages consisting of 2×2 poles spaced 2 feet apart around each plant. Holes were drilled in the posts and bamboo stakes were hung at intervals on all sides.

The second method uses a product we found on the web: Veggie Cages! This is a plastic spiral “track” that is staked into the ground at one end and attached to the top of a pole on the other end. The spiral narrows from bottom to top. The two techniques can be seen in these photos:
  
At the end of the season, we’ll give our opinions about the various methods.

This entry was posted by Steve on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Yard/Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.