How to Set Up a Low Maintenance Garden : How to Prune a Tomato Plant

Learn how to prune tomato plants in your garden in this free video on low maintenance gardening.

Expert: Doug Smiddy
Bio: Doug Smiddy has had an active interest in gardening as long has he can remember.
Filmmaker: Dale Fitzgerald

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• garden
• gardening
• tips
• easy
• maintenance
• watering
• free
• online
• video
• tools
• soil
• raised
• bed
• fertilizer
• grow
• plan
• planting
• seeds
• vertical
• weeds
• beans
• tomatoes
• peppers
• prune

[Praxxus55712]

This video is 100% wrong and gives false information. He is confusing suckers with leaf branches. You need to remove the suckers if you want the plant to devote all it's energy to building the size and flavor of the tomatoes as opposed to growing more side shoot stalks. The branches are absolutely needed to fuel the plant. Notice the plant has produced large tomatoes before pruning? It needs those branches to stay alive long enough to allow them to ripen. This is the dumbest advice I have seen.

[Praxxus55712]

Pavinatar also, roots absorb water and nutrients. Leaves use sunlight to transform it into useable energy for the plant AND fruit. This is not my opinion, it is botanical science. Your grandmother would get just as large fruit if she left the leaves on the plant. This guy is absolutely wrong.

[BoswelliaSerrata]

He's saying that once the tomatoes are already grown and you're waiting for them to ripen you can cut them off. Otherwise he is not advising you do this before the tomatoes are grown. lol

[gaboftak]

well.we plant tomatoes but never do like in this video!!!maybe when is end of season is point to do this,when you just want to finish last harvest.got it?.othervise is stupid!

[MayMay13168]

i did that with my tomato plants, that just started to have flowers, no fruits yet, i cut all the one have no flower(s), and my tomato plants die, all 3 of them. what did i do wrong?

[muck4doo]

Was this done as a joke? That was the most retarded gardening advice i have ever seen.

[smyers820gm]

@hpd707 I'm not arguing one way or the other. But it appears, once again, to work for HIM and few others that have tried it. Guess you didn't read what I was really commenting about. Maybe you should reread it.....just a thought.

[hpd707]

@pavinatar

You MIGHT get larger fruit, but at the expense of production. You will get fewer tomatoes and a reduction in the pounds of tomatoes produced. Doing something like this near the end of the season might make sense as a way to force the remaining fruit to ripen before the first frost, but I would still not prune as drastically because you don't want your fruits to be scalded by the sun.

[hpd707]

@smyers820gm

So when he has a 95 degree day and his tomatoes are scalded by the sun, he will have better fruit? Is that what you're arguing? When he argues that the plant's leaves need to be raped in order to "focus it's energy on the fruit," where is that energy coming from? Anyone have an answer for that? The leaves are the engines that produce the form of energy used by the plant to make fruit, but this goof cut them all off!

[hpd707]

@BlitzkriegStaffords

Actually, it does look healthy, but not very large or productive. But maybe that's because he cuts too many leaves off his plants!

[hpd707]

@thehomevintner

The ripening won't be "retarded" if you don't prune. You're full of beans. How many tomatoes have you actually grown without pruning? I've grown dozens and they all produced ample fruit that began ripening around the times specified for the varieties. I've had tomatoes as early as June in an area where most don't begin ripening until July.