"Suckering" Tomato Plants
Here's a cluster of big, late-summer cherry tomatoes, day 110. These are from a plant I continually "suckered," which means that I repeatedly sold it junky cars at an over-inflated prices through craigslist in the hope that it'll never be able to find me when the wheels falls off.
Actually, suckering is the process of removing extra growth in an attempt to keep one continuous mainline stem. The idea is that this allows the plant to devote more nutrients toward the fruit at the expense of overall yield. Think: quality over quantity. Suckering helps to keep the plant manageable. This is important if the plant is grown in a container. In some plants, suckers bear fruit while in others they do not. Suckers usually appear not at the tips of the plant but lower down in areas where the growth has already happened. Here's a page about how to prune tomato plants.
The alternative, letting the plant grow naturally like a bush, may result in a larger yield but perhaps smaller fruit. All of this is highly debatable, however.
Anecdotally, tomatoes from suckered plants on the grange have been larger but there have been fewer of them. The unpruned plant produced gobs of tomatoes, but most of them have been small. Then again, this might be because the extra growth drained nutrients from the container faster than the suckered plants did. Either way, you can't go wrong. For more gardening tips, see the rest of my blog. In particular, here's a post about how to grow tomatoes in containers.
Actually, suckering is the process of removing extra growth in an attempt to keep one continuous mainline stem. The idea is that this allows the plant to devote more nutrients toward the fruit at the expense of overall yield. Think: quality over quantity. Suckering helps to keep the plant manageable. This is important if the plant is grown in a container. In some plants, suckers bear fruit while in others they do not. Suckers usually appear not at the tips of the plant but lower down in areas where the growth has already happened. Here's a page about how to prune tomato plants.
The alternative, letting the plant grow naturally like a bush, may result in a larger yield but perhaps smaller fruit. All of this is highly debatable, however.
Anecdotally, tomatoes from suckered plants on the grange have been larger but there have been fewer of them. The unpruned plant produced gobs of tomatoes, but most of them have been small. Then again, this might be because the extra growth drained nutrients from the container faster than the suckered plants did. Either way, you can't go wrong. For more gardening tips, see the rest of my blog. In particular, here's a post about how to grow tomatoes in containers.
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