Video: How to Prune a Tomato Plant

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

Comments

View all 10 Comments

daveonbelay May 27, 2011

Thank Scott - just the advice I was looking for!

evans.benz May 23, 2011

The video has to play the second time before I get to see it.

Enrique May 03, 2011

LOVE SMIDDY'S

Scott Mar 30, 2011

Smiddy's Gardening Services? Yeah, right. This guy comes across as an uneducated handyman who thinks he's an expert. Leaves produce the sugar needed by the fruit, so why, under normal circumstances, would you want to cut off the leaves? The only time you might want to follow his advice is near the end of the growing season as a way to stress/force the plant into ripening some of the remaining fruit, but even then I wouldn't prune as drastically because then you're risking sun damage to the fruit. Sunscalded tomatoes are ugly.

Neil Davidson Aug 09, 2010

Brilliant tips thankyou Doug from uk

Video Transcript

I'm Doug Smiddy of Smiddy's Gardening Services here on behalf of expertvillage.com and welcome to my garden. Today we're here to talk about pruning your tomato plant. Now why do we prune a tomato plant? Because now we're at the stage where you could see all the fruit is set, all the leaves are out. We don't really need to waste the plants energy on producing more leaves, we want the plants energy to go to producing in growing these tomatoes and ripen. So what you want to do is look around your plant and you can see some little yellow flowers and that eventually is going to form a tomato. The idea is to prune away all the non flowering branches like this. See this little one here cut him away. Don't be afraid to over do it just be careful before you cut it that there's no flower or fruit on it. Like over here we can cut that and again it really don't make much sense to waste that plants energy on a non flowering branch. I tell you what when it's done it's not going to look pretty but that doesn't matter, your tomatoes are going to be riped and red and absolutely beautiful. As you can see I have left anything on the plant that has already or will be producing a tomato. Even a small little tomato will eventually grow into a little tomato like that, which will grow into a bigger tomato and start to ripen like that and eventually with the tomatoes like these which are ready for picking. I cut off all the non flowering branches, as a matter of fact I just missed one, cut that off too. The leaves have done their jobs already, they've preformed their photosynthesis duties. Again, you want the plants energy to focus on ripening these tomatoes so the sunlight can hit them and again it doesn't look pretty, but oh boy you're going to love the results.

How to Prune a Tomato Plant

Comments

Related Ads

Related Articles & Videos