For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
how to prune tomatoes 🍅 for max production
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When it comes to pruning tomato plants, gardeners usually fall into two camps: those who tell you to cut off every tomato sucker, and those who tell you to leave them alone. The people who remove tomato suckers do so to improve their chances of getting bigger tomatoes (at the expense of more growth), while the people who let things be are happy to get any and all tomatoes, no matter their size. Me, personally? During my 7 years of growing food in Southern California, I NEVER pruned my tomatoes. I never saw a need to, as I had plenty of tomatoes and few to no pests or diseases to worry about. Also, living in zone 10b (with zero frost) meant I could keep my plants alive through winter, so my tomato-growing season was exceptionally long. But now that I live in zone 5, my season is exceptionally short (with the last frost in June and first frost in September), so I need to squeeze as many fruits as possible out of my plants before temperatures start dropping. To achieve this, I prune my tomatoes selectively—meaning I actually DON'T get rid of my suckers. I keep most of them. And in doing so, I'm able to harvest a good amount of fruit throughout the season, rather than hedging my bets on a smaller number of tomatoes that I want to get bigger. This is exactly how I prune my tomato plants for maximum production. I give you a few reasons why you should prune, and also when and why you might not want to prune so much. Seasonal tipsLooking to add a new tree to your yard?FastGrowingTrees is running an early Memorial Day sale until Monday. Use code EARLY20 to get 20% off everything on the site! (And some items are up to 60% off. 🙌) I wrote a post here on the best fast-growing trees for privacy, shade, color, and more if you don't know what you need yet. P.S. Should you remove tomato suckers? Here's how I prune my tomato plants for maximum production. P.P.S. Your tomato trimmings don't have to go to waste. You can steep a few sprigs in tomato sauce to punch up the flavor—and there's a lot more you can use out of your garden than you probably think!
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Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."