What part of a tomato plant is called "sucker"?
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It's the growth between the stem and a side branch, at the node, rather like a stem growing up from where another stem begins.
I'm not sure this picture is very helpful:http://www.taunton.com/finegardening/pag...
I don't think tomatoes have suckers. A sucker is one of the ways plants reproduce themselves. A strawberry puts out suckers which take root then you can cut them off from the parent plant but a tomato doesn't do this.
a sucker is a branch that starts to grow from the point where another branch grows from the stem - it is called a sucker becasue it will not bear fruit, it just uses some of the nutrients that could be used by the fruit bearing branches - usually you pinch these off to remove them
Once you have the beginnings of your tomatoes, these are the buds that appear elsewhere.
The idea is to not allow them to rob the already forming "fruit" of nutrients. By pinching them off, you allow the tomatoes already growing to grow larger.
I guess you don't have to pinch them off, you'd just have lots of smaller tomatoes.
Suckers are growth between a leaf and the stem. I call suckers to anything that is not growing buds on. So, what I do, that gives me excelent results, is peel the plant. I trim off every single branch that is not growing flowers at this time of the year. The plant focuses on building up those tomatoes real big!
I am in zone 6. Many nurseries have sold out of tomato seedlings by now. What you see on a plant at this time, is pretty much what you'll get to ripen. So you can increase the quality (and maybe quantity) of the fruit by trimming off all those suckers!
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