How to Sucker Tomatoes
July 30, 2008 by Doug
Filed under Vegetables, Video
Here’s a short clip on how to take the suckers off tomatoes. It’s not too late to go out and do this on any staked tomato (in fact you should). Leave the tomatoes you have growing on the ground or in cages alone.
As an added thought – you grow staked tomatoes if you’re trying to maximize the amount of fruit per square foot of garden. You let them flop if you’re trying to maximize the amount of fruit per plant.
Just wanted to add that we saw the tomato pruning video as well and we are still sort of confused.
I have a variety called “Early Girl” growing in a large washtub container and I staked it (though I just learned I put the cage on upside down).
I took a good look at it to see if there is “one main leader” and there really isn’t anything I can identify as such. There ARE tomatoes growing everywhere, though, some large some quite small.
Thanks for any help you can give!
@Alana -
If you’re growing indeterminate plants – you’re going to find one main “leader” that is staked up – the rest of branches and suckers are removed.
If you’re growing determinate plants – then they are best left to lie on the ground or cages and produce as many suckers as you can.
Suckers fruit too eventually,.
You simply have to prune and train when the plant is young enough to pick the main stem it starts with and don’t let others develop. Once you have allowed them to grow unpruned – then totally changing the growth pattern isn’t a great idea. I staked but allowed the plant to develop a bit extra for the sake of showing you the difference.
It sounds as if you’ve started letting these plants simply grow on the ground/cages and I’d continue doing this. I’ve written a lot more about tomatoes over at my http://www.beginner-gardening.com website so perhaps those articles will help a bit as well.
p.s. putting a cage over a plant isn’t staking. It’s cage growing or whatever else you want to call it. Staking is when you grow one central leader up a stake or string and prune out the rest.
Thanks for your reply!
So, you only need to prune if you stake, and you only need to stake if you have limited space and if it is an “indeterminate” plant.
You don’t stake when you cage it, so you don’t need to prune. You do this if you have a “determinate” plant.
I think you also wrote in another post that you limit fruit production the first way, but produce more fruit the second.
You’ve raised another question for me, though. Is determinate and indeterminate dependant on the kind of variety–or is it something you create by pruning/staking or not pruning/not staking? Perhaps that link will answer that.
Looking forward to reading it. Perhaps next year will be better–though, frankly, I’m thrilled to have fresh grown tomatoes at all, no matter how big or small, right now. (It was my very first attempt to actually grow anything.)
Thanks very much.
@Alana -
It’s the variety. And with staking you get more fruit per square foot. With letting them flop on the ground, you get more per plant. Caging is somewhere between I suspect.
HELLO—I HAVE READ WHEN YOU PLANT A SUCKER AND GROWS THE
SUCKER PLANT WILL PROCUCE MORE TOMATOES THEN THE
PARENT PLANT. HAVE YOU TRIED THIS?
@roger weirick -
Haven’t tried it – but it sounds like pure wishful thinking to me. The sucker has no more genetic potential off the mother plant than it had on the mother plant.