The single best piece of advice I’ve received about growing tomatoes in the last few years has been this, from Nicole Burke at Gardenary:
If you plant indeterminate or vining tomatoes, leave the suckers and prune the old growth.
That’s backwards from what you do with bush-type tomatoes. With those, you prune the suckers so the plant puts all its energy into growing big, healthy tomatoes in one main flush. They set their fruit. You harvest a lot in a short window of time. Then that plant is done.
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But indeterminate tomatoes keep growing and growing and growing until frost, which means you can keep having more and more tomatoes if you know what to do.
That’s where this advice comes in. If you’ve given them an appropriate structure to support all that continued growth, like my arch trellis here, then you can prune the old, non-fruiting branches, and leave the suckers to grow into more and more fruiting branches.
It really works—IF you stay on top of your pruning.
August is when most of us are losing that gardening energy we started out with, me included.
But if I’m going to give anything continued attention, it’s these tomato vines. I know that if I keep them tidy, I’ll still be eating my favorite cherry tomatoes through October.
I probably have never done as good a job keeping them pruned as I have this year, and—I almost hate to write this because it feels like a jinx—I think I’ve noticed another benefit to pruning vining tomatoes regularly.
I have not seen a single tomato hornworm this year. GASP. No fruitworms either, and only one cutworm so far.
I had lots of caterpillars last year—so it’s not like they just haven’t found me.
My only hypothesis is that in all my regular pruning, I inadvertently destroyed many of the eggs before they hatched.
That could still prove to be false, as one year’s data is not exactly evidence.
But I’m now sitting on in multi-years evidence that pruning this way leads to more tomatoes, so I’ll keep at it until something proves me otherwise.
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