How to Prune Tomato Plants to Increase Yields - Pruning and Trellising Tomato Vines

Learn the secrets to growing healthier, more productive tomato plants! In this video, we're at the Yale Farm demonstrating our high-tunnel trellising system. I'll show you how to identify 'suckers,' prune for a single leader, and improve airflow to prevent disease and rot.

These simple expert pro-tips will help you get high-quality fruit and virtually eliminate losses from soil-born diseases.

Time Stamp Video Chapters:
0:00 - Tomato Trellising in a High Tunnel
0:32 - Benefits of Pruning for Fruit Quality
0:58 - How to Identify a Tomato 'Sucker'
1:18 - Removing Suckers: The Single Leader Method
1:54 - Wrapping Vines Around Twine
2:15 - Pruning Bottom Leaves for Airflow
2:30 - Mitigating Disease Pressure
3:12 - Why Keeping Leaves Dry is Critical
3:45 - Drip Irrigation Tips for Tomatoes"

Are you cutting off the wrong branches? See how to grow tomato plants 10 feet tall by pruning and trellising. This easy method for growing great tomatoes will increase your yield and get you higher quality fruit from each tomato plant.

Daniel MacPhee: One of the systems that we're especially proud of at the Yale Farm is the way that we trellis our tomatoes. So as you can see, we're growing inside a plastic covered high tunnel. And we're using we're utilizing the stringers along the top to run twine that the plants actually grow up over the course of the season.

And in order to make the system work, you need to actually prune the tomato plants, which can be a little bit of work, but it's pretty simple. And it means that the fruit that we harvest from these plants might not be whole poundage, might be a little less over the course of the season, but the quality of each individual fruit is a lot higher and we have virtually no losses due to rotting and other soil borne diseases. So what we can do is get down here and take a look at one of these plants and see what a sucker actually looks like.

So if you look up the stem of each plant and see where the leaves come out of the stem, at the top of each leaf, you'll see a sucker that comes out and this will become an independent tomato.

Vine will produce fruit. But what we want to do is take off every single one of these suckers except for the main central leader at the top of the plant. So this is actually another really huge sucker that we need a knife for.

You want to be very cautious that as you're snapping them off with your fingers, you're not actually tearing the stem of the plant. So Eric has a knife for us. We want to be really careful and just chop off that sucker.

Usually they should not be this big. This is one that escaped detection by the interns. And you want to be careful. Even if they're really huge, it's important to take them off. You want to have just a single leader on your plant.

And what you're going to do, either you can wrap it, wrap the plant around your twine periodically, like every foot or so. Just give it a wrap. And it will the friction will just allow the vine to climb up and up and up the twine.

And what this does is the plant over the course of the season will continue growing and growing and growing. And it's important as the plants get bigger, to be pruning the bottom leaves. So after you've harvested fruit, go ahead and and prune the leaves up to that bottom fruit cluster.

And that will allow for better airflow and hopefully mitigate some disease pressure on these plants. Tomatoes are very susceptible to leaf diseases and this method of slicing is really good because it gets them up off the ground. You don't have water splashing soil onto the leaves and bringing in various different diseases and at the same time it

gets very good airflow.

And this is really important for tomatoes and other solid crops, because they're very susceptible to leaf diseases. And as long as the leaves stay dry, there's no entry point for diseases. So a couple of years back, we were all, you know, despairing over late blight in this part of the country.

And we actually had no problems here in our tomatoes. We had problems in our field, potatoes that were outside of the plastic. But because the leaves never get wet, the spores can be in the air, they can be on the plant, but they're never actually able to enter the plant and infect the plant.

So that's an added bonus of having this plastic over the top. Of course it means that then we need to irrigate. But tomatoes don't actually need a lot of water, so they don't take a ton of irrigation. And we do that.

We accomplish that using this drip tape that you can see this empty bed over by Eric's foot, and it just emits a small amount of water very slowly over the course of the day. We leave it on for about 2 hours every second or third day, depending on how dry it's been.

And that's ample water for the plants. And it means that we're also not irrigating all of the weeds around the tomatoes themselves.

#TomatoPruning #GardeningTips #VegetableGarden #TomatoCare #HobbyGardener #GardenClips