Question about prunning tomato plants, how and how often should you do it in order to get best biggest fruits?
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Tomato plants should not be pruned but they can be stopped if that is what you mean. Depending on where you live and whether the plants are protected or not but it would be sensible in the UK to pinch out the growing tip after 5 trusses, flower bearing shoots, have set i.e. the flowers have been pollinated. Extra side shoots should be removed from cordon trained plants, i.e. plants grown as a single stem as these side shoots will remove energy from the plants reducing the size of the fruits they also increase the time that the fruits will take to mature and ripen. Bush plants can be allowed to set as many side shoots as you like but again think about the maturing time and whether you wish to be left with a large number of very small very green tomatoes that haven't had the chance to ripen.
only snap off any stems / branches IF they start to wilt and die off
these stems will snap off easily
pruning your tomato plants will only make your plants try to heal ie, taking more energy to fix it's wounds instead of producing more and/or bigger fruits
if you want bigger fruits fertilize and water well
I'm no expert, but I have so many tomatoes in my window sill, I expect someone to film a "B-Movie" there.
I've got four plants going and I cut, (not snap), any suckers, non-productive (branches without flowers or fruit), or unhealthy looking branches every morning when I water and pick. My plants look a little spindly, but they are still loaded with fruit, (it is near the end of our spring season here).
There is another advantage...I can spot those devil caterpillars with ease.
There is no need to prune tomato plants and if you do cut off branches or not the size of the fruits are unaffected. Only if you have an indeterminant plant (means that it just keeps growing) and it is overtaking space or unmanageable should you cut off branches. If you cut off branches you will just be losing more fruit.
On fruit trees, like peach or apricot, fruit is thinned from trees while in the very early stage of development so that the remaining fruit that matures is larger and the branches aren't overloaded to the point of breaking off the tree.
Have grown them for over 30 years, never heard of pruning them other than to cut off broken or diseased or wildly growing branches.
Deends on whether you want a few extra large fruits to win the county fair or more pounds of fruit for eating. If you prune off all but a few fruits (remove the little ones as they form), the plant will put most of its energy into those fruits. But the plant will not produce much total weight of tomatoes.
If you leave on all the fruits as they form, you will get much more total weight but as many smaller fruits.
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