How To Trim Your Tomato Plants

This will allow for the wounds from the pruning to heal cleanly and will reduce the chances of the plant being infected by disease.

How to trim your tomato plants. Pruning your tomato plant will improve the airflow for the plant make harvesting fruit easier and help your plant produce larger tomatoes in the long run. And the more suckers you take off the larger. Check the plant for signs of yellowing. Using a sharp clean pair of pruning shears snip these small sucker branches off.

Hold the part of the plant between your thumb and index finger before gently snapping the piece away. Continue reading show full articles. Suckers under two inches long can simply be pinched off with your fingers but with larger suckers use a pair of clean pruners disinfecting them as you move from plant to plant to protect against spreading diseases. Most sections of the plant should be easily pinched off.

One very important thing to keep in mind though is the variety of tomato youre growing this will determine whether or not you should prune your tomato plants. Pruning tomato plants is actually an optional technique. The best time to prune tomato plants is in the early morning on a dry day. Whenever possible remove the suckers when they are small.

Determine which variety youre growing. Deciding when to prune tomatoes 1. To help improve airflow and cut down on the chance of disease remove the leaves along the bottom 12 inches of the stems of indeterminate tomato plants. You should only prune indeterminate varieties.

Before you make any cuts figure out whether youre growing an indeterminate. You may need to move the piece back and forth until it loosens enough to break off. One way to know when it is time to start pruning is to wait for the stems and. Some gardeners swear by it while others choose not to do it.

Most tomato pruning can be done by pinching off whatever part of the plant needs to be removed.