Summer Pruning

[TomatoDon]

I know we've had endless opinions on pruning, pinching suckers, and so on. It seems like different things work well for different people.

I've noticed my tendency has been to not prune hardly anything for the first part of the season, and then I notice how aggressive I am over in the summer when I do start pruning. I've started that in the last few days and have given most of the plants a good haircut. I curious to see if any of you go through this mid-season prune fest also, and if you think it helps.

I have a lot of plants, so it's hard to stay on top of pruning and sucker-pinching all through the early season. Now, however, I have (had) uite a few large branches that got so heavy that they bent severely growing out of the cage and although they had some blooms and a few small tomatoes, I never saw many that amounted to much. I ruthlessly went through recently cut these off, but all small branches that had any yellow leaves, large suckers that had no blooms or fruit, the stems that grow downward with no blooms or fruit, and basically anything I see that doesn't look useful or healthy. I'm hoping that all the energy will now go to the blooms and small fruit on branches and stems that are thriving.

I wanted to see what the rest of you are doing with your pruning at this point in the season. I'm having a stellar crop on many varieties, and probably one of the best mid-season crops I've had in several years. I've taken a lot of pictures that I'm posting on Flicker and will psate the link below. I'm adding pictures daily now, so check often for updates and new additions. I left it open, so I think any of you can post comments there too.

Here is the link to "sets" on my Flicker account.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomatodon/sets/

Don