My wife keeps trimming our grape tomatoes, and it looks like she’s trimmed too much from the plant (my opinion). If you see on the first picture, she has left nothing but the two tomatoes from the vines and a small branch of leaves while cutting off the top of the plant and any other branches from the stock.
My question is can this stunt the quality and ripeness of the tomatoes, or is this not a large concern?
She ended up doing this on her other two tomato plants and I mentioned it was butchering the plant from energy and growth. I did ask her to not touch the two tomato plants seen in these pictures for I was trimming them from the bottom up slowly each weekend and cutting off any flowers that didn’t expend extra energy from the plant. I just do not want to approach her for something that isn’t a big concern.
by jonzzy22
9 Comments
Just wait and see what works better
It looks like she chopped the growth tip. So the plant will kinda stop growing- putting on more fruit clusters.
It’s fine to cut off lower leaves and cut off suckers. But she did de-head the plant. Give it time and it might throw out a new sucker. That new sucker is your new growth tip. Let that growth tip grow to make more fruit clusters.
So next time, leave at least 1 main growth tip. It may look like a sucker, but you need a growth tip that will continue to put out more fruit cluster branches.
It’ll grow I’ve chopped tomatoe plants down and come back 2 weeks later they be growing from the stalk at the ground
She may be under the impression that the fruit requires sun to ripen. Assure her that it’s only temperature, and in fact those leaves save the fruit from getting sunscald/ruining.
As long as it’s an indeterminate, it’s going to be just fine. It’ll send out more growth. And even if it doesn’t, there’s enough leaves that it’ll have enough power to *at least* ripen your current fruit.
These are cherries. You can hack them up pretty well and it will still produce. This doesn’t mean it is good for the plant.
The whole “pruning to focus energy” is one of those tomato myths that might seem to make sense on the surface, but falls apart pretty quickly when you look at it from a botanical standpoint.
Tomatoes don’t get “energy” from the ground. They also don’t generate, store, or expend energy like animals do by ingesting compounds with chemical bonds that are used to produce a range of energy.
They use energy from light to make sugar out of water provided from the roots and carbon dioxide taken in by the leaves. This production happens primarily in the leaves.
Nutrients like phosphorus, nitrogen, magnesium, zinc, boron, calcium, etc. are necessary nutrients that the tomato needs to grow and produce fruit, but they are not directly involved in sugar production (outside of being needed to build the sugar producing mechanisms in the plant).
Based on this straightforward botanical fact, it is hard to rationalize how pruning off leaves in anyway helps the plant produce or conserve “energy”. Some plants can transport sugar to their roots and store it (think a carrot), but tomatos are not that king of plant.
There have been studies that show that sugars that go to the fruit are provided by the closest leaves. The plant obviously has the ability to move sugars around since it will produce fruit when you prune all the local leaves, but it does this at the expense of other things.
Have you tried asking her not to?
I personally only prune cherry types for airflow.
I’ve heard only trim off 1/3 of the leaves…trimming itt does increase airflow so you don’t have as many fungus issues
Trimming the growing tip when you want your tomatoes to ripen at the end of the season is one of the best things you can do a tually. It begins redistributing the growth hormone auxin to all the growth points below the trim point after you trim it, helping the tomatoes below to ripen quicker.