Someone saw my plants and said they are too young to grow fruit and that I should pluck the blooms and let them get older.
Do you agree with this suggestion?
by tablecoffeebook
Someone saw my plants and said they are too young to grow fruit and that I should pluck the blooms and let them get older.
Do you agree with this suggestion?
by tablecoffeebook
6 Comments
People get MAD about this topic in here LOL!
I have always plucked the first round of flowers so the plant can focus on growing bigger. That being said, this tomato looks pretty big so I probably wouldn’t in this case.
No, but the yellowing of the leaves is concerning
I want tomatoes and I want them now… so I don’t pluck the flowers.
Not at all
Depends. When did you put it in the ground?Tomatoes need to develop a root system. If it’s only been a week, pick them. Two or more weeks should be fine.
gonna polish off my same answer again (it’s been getting a lot of use lately)
Craig Lehouiller (a gardener of 40+ years, tomato breeder, and author of Epic Tomatoes) says in his book that it’s best to leave flowers alone
he says no need to pinch blossoms on transplants, the plant knows best, and he’s gotten some nice early fruit by leaving flowers or baby fruit on plants
in side by side comparisons, he says he’s observed no setback in establishment, health, or size of plants that were transplanted with vs without flowers. in his words, “all you are doing by plucking first flowers is delaying gratification”
to add a little complexity to the matter: i found a study that tested removing 2/3 of early flowers from young tomato plants vs leaving them on https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-7348.1979.tb04729.x
They found that removal “resulted in larger plants which had fewer, larger fruits and eventually a fruit yield almost as large as the controls.”
so in that case, plucking flowers did give a bigger plant and larger individual fruits but slightly reduced overall yield
i guess that suggests: if you’re trying to grow a record-size individual tomato, pluck your blossoms. if, like me, you just want to maximize the mass of your total haul by the end of the season, leave them