die, you suckers!

I’ve had very few successes in growing tomatoes. Then and now, I have way too few fruit on my plants. I've got about four roma tomato plants but so far, I only have a handful of fruit.

After I’ve spoken with another backyard tomato grower over the weekend, I realized my own tomatoes’ problems: too much foliage, so not much fruit.

Crawling through Google’s motley advice on proper tomato pruning, I found that pruning yields more and larger fruits.

The expert tomato growers also say that it’s best to prune early, when the potential problem stems are just tinny weenie suckers. So as I go through my tomatoes, I found myself crying out, “Die, you suckers!” without the guilt and with all satisfaction, heh.

One advice I discovered says to keep tomatoes free of these side stems beneath the first fruit cluster but since I’ve pretty much left my tomatoes to their own devices, the profusion of foliage can’t be solved by simply pinching off the suckers.

This time, I had to do some major snipping. Where there were bigger (and leafy) side stems, I had to cut down to the first couple of leaves on the side stem. I hear it’s best so as to prevent trauma to the plant.

I hope all the pinching off and snipping didn’t traumatize my tomato plants though. I’ll have to look see tomorrow afternoon, after they’ve withstood the hot weather. Hope the pruning don’t get them sun-scalded.