In general, I do not prune much at all, and when I do it, it is only to keep a pathway open or to remove a branch with diseased foliage. My garden becomes a huge jungle, but a very productive one.

In our heat (the last two summers, we have increasingly had occasional days with a high temp between 108-115 much more than we had them in past years) and in a garden with full sun for most of the day, I feel like the tomato plants need all the foliage they have in order to reduce sunscald and also to produce well.

Remember that the foliage is the photosynthesis factory that keeps the plants producing. For every bit of foliage you remove, you're reducing the plants' ability to conduct photosynthesis.

Benefits? Better air circulation if your plants are next to a structure, a stockade fence, or too close to one another. Perhaps a lower rate of foliar disease due to better air circulation and less foliage, but some years we are so dry we see little foliar disease here anyway. Perhaps bigger fruit but only because you'll have less fruit since the limbs you remove are not there to produce more fruit. Make sense?

Negatives.? Less photosynthesis capacity due to lessened foliage. More sunscald. Fewer fruit overall, though the ones you get may be bigger....if you can keep them from sunscalding long enough to break color. Then, if you're worried about sunscald, you always can pick them at the breaker stage and bring them inside to ripen indoors.

Because I want for every plant I grow to produce as much as possible, I try to not prune off anything at all, so cannot advise you on how much to prune. You know, if you decide to do it, you could prune some of the plants and leave the others alone and see which ones do better for you.

If you prune and start seeing sunscald, you can errect shade cloth (kinda pricey, but it works) over your plants. I use shade cloth over pepper and tomato plants (only some tomatoes, not all) beginning in July in order to keep them producing longer and better in the extreme heat and long sunny days. By keeping the plants partially shaded, you can keep them happier in extreme heat and they will continue to produce longer as long as you don't use a shade cloth with a high degree of shading. I have 40% shadecloth and 50% shadecloth.

Growing up in Texas, no one that I knew who gardened regularly ever pruned their tomato plants, and my memory dates back to the 1960s, Everyone caged them and used good spacing and let them produce all the foliage they could in order to prevent sunscald. I've always gardened that way and always have been happy with the results. I also do not necessarily follow good spacing rules every year. Sometimes I put the plants much closer together than I should, aware that doing so will give me a dense jungle, but I don't care, as long as I get tomatoes and lots of them.

In some very wet years (2004 and 2007 come to mind), with lots of rain and high humidity, I did prune off the bottom couple of feet of foliage at mid-season to deter Early Blight. Most years, good mulching and good watering practices (putting the water on the ground, not on the plants) keep Early Blight under control but in a year where it rains every second or third day, we see more issues here with diseases like Early Blight, Bacterial Speck, Bacterial Spot or Septoria, and in years like that, I think that pruning lower foliage is beneficial but I won't do it until the plants already have set tons of tomatoes.

Dawn

Gracias, Dawn. Great info and insight.

Reed, you're welcome. To be perfectly clear, I am very anti-pruning when it comes to tomatoes, but some people do it and like it. I just would rather deal with a jungle than sunscald, but my garden is fully exposed to wind on all 4 sides since it is a country garden right in the middle of an old cow pasture. In a suburban or urban garden, you may find it necessary to prune somewhat for better air flow and less disease. I understand that.

Dawn

September thru December in a greenhouse; I tried to keep all of the sucker off of three out of four beds and kept the plants tied up. This worked very well. I did not get near the production off of the unpruned plants that I did from those that were pruned. Variety also played a part in this, Homestead #24s just did not make while Match did great. The pic is what we picked after cold got the approximately 160 plants. These were planted in early September and this pic is the day after Christmas.

Is this an optical illusion, Paul? And, the table is really only 3 feet long instead of appearing to be 20 feet or more long?

Just kidding - that's a LOT of tomatos! Did they taste pretty good since they were greenhouse grown? Just wondering. I've never heard of Match so will have to look that one up.

Thanks for showing us your beautiful bounty!

Susan

The table is actually about 4 ft x 16 ft. These were in a greenhouse but organically grown in raised beds. They were very good.

I tried to look up Match tomatoe, but I got a lot of other garbage with it. Ah, well.......

Still, that's a great photo, Paul, and a LOT of tomatoes!

Susan

Ponderpaul, That's a lot of tomatoes. I am assuming it is a commercial crop and that y'all sell that at the farmer's market or to retail stores.

Pruning for greenhouse production is a separate thing from pruning for home garden production. Greenhouse tomatoes normally are more intensively managed than home garden tomatoes.

Susan, Match is a variety bred for greenhouse production, with fruit slightly more oblate than the highly-rated Trust tomato commonly grown in many operations. Match's plants get larger than Trust's, but I don't know how they compare in terms of lbs. of fruit per plant.

I've only grown a few tomato varieties in the home garden that were bred for greenhouse production and we didn't like them as they are too similar to grocery store tomatoes even when grown naturally in the home garden and allowed to fully ripen on the vine. You can get very heavy production from them, but the fruit are more hard/firm than most home-grown tomatoes. When we grew those commercial types earlier in the 2000s, we ate the normal garden tomatoes ourselves but gave away all the greenhouse type fruit or canned them. If we wanted the typical hard/firm greenhouse tomatoes like what you buy at the grocery store, I wouldn't go to all the trouble to raise them myself. I'd just buy them at a grocery store or farmer's market. : )

Connoisseurs of fresh home-grown tomatoes generally won't eat varieties bred specifically for commercial production because their texture and degree of firmness are very different from that of home garden varieties. They breed that hardness into the fruit so they don't crush when packed and shipped and it is my least favorite thing about those types of tomatoes. Around 2008 or 2009 I tried a bunch of varieties bred for commercial production and they produced boatloads of tomatoes that looked really pretty but had horrible firmness and texture. It was like I'd gone to the grocery store and bought those things that pass for tomatoes in grocery stores.

Dawn

We sell what we can through the local greenhouse and employees use what they want. Along with the Match, we also had Red Cherry Large, Celebrity and Heatwave. They were all very good when allowed to ripen on the vine. I did not prune the Celebrity ��" they were the proverbial jungle ��" but the others did quiet well.