How to Remove Suckers From Organic Tomato Vines

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Growing organic tomatoes is much more difficult than using fertilizer, especially with high nitrogen content. You really need to maximize the energy in the plant to produce the most fruit possible. A tomato plant is a vine, not a bush. Thus, its nature is to grow long and thin rather than short and bushy. In order to facilitate this growth pattern, you need to identify and remove the suckers before they grow into branches.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

Tomato Stakes (6-8 feet long, but no shorter than 4 feet)
Biodegradable Twine
Garden Shears
Small Sledge

Step1

Attend to your garden closely, especially during the first week of planting. Check on it each morning and evening in addition to other tending to it that you do.

Step2

Spend a generous amount of time weeding, hoeing and watering your garden, but also visit the garden at least once each day just to look at it.

Step3

Tie the main stem to a wooden stake (at least 6 feet in length) by the time if has grown about 2 feet and again every 2 feet of growth. This exercise is an excellent opportunity to become familiar with the plant, maybe even to develop a relationship with it. Learn to be extremely delicate, gentle and deliberate--the way you would treat a baby. When the plant is much larger, it will be more forgiving. Until it has been growing at least a month, you can easily stunt its growth. Rough treatment can destroy its ability to bear fruit.

Step4

Each time you tie up the plant to the stake, look carefully and patiently for suckers. A sucker is any new stem that grows in the inside corner created by the main stem and a branch.

Step5

Identify the sucker. Normally a sucker will grow at a 45-degree angle from the main stem between the stem and a branch that is growing at a 90-degree angle from the stem. Be careful though. It's a far better course to miss some than to pluck a primary branch or the main stem. Until you are very comfortable with this process, only risk removing the ones that are unmistakably suckers. This is best accomplished by selecting only the ones that are much smaller than the stem and branch between which they grow.

Step6

Remove the suckers by pinching them at the base between your thumb and forefinger. If you catch it early on, it is easily removed with a light pinch without causing any damage to the plant. If you allow the sucker to grow large enough to actually become a branch, you will need to use garden shears to cut it. But be careful--you can easily cut the wrong stem or damage another stem or branch when you are cutting the sucker.

Step7

Continue to pinch or cut out the suckers throughout the life of the plant. They will continue to show up. They will also often be much longer and larger than you expect, but they will grow very fast when the plant is larger (seemingly overnight).

Tips & Warnings

During the learning stage, take your time and perhaps inspect each plant with no other task at hand in order to prevent any distraction or lack of concentration when you are looking for suckers. You will be surprised at how many times you look for suckers and miss them, then later discover one the next time you look--even if it is only a few minutes later.
If you have to look really hard at a branch to decide whether it is a sucker, then you should probably wait till another day to remove it.
Avoid removing suckers near the top end of the vine because you can easily stunt the growth of the plant by accidentally removing the main stem or a main branch that looks like a sucker. It is best to concentrate on suckers lower down on the plant where they are safer and easier to identify and also easier to remove. Even if you accurately identify a sucker near the top end of the stem, the growth is more fragile and much easier to damage.