Have I over pruned them? How is the yield looking to experienced growers?
I’m in hardiness zone 7b and the bed is south facing.
Edit: ok I have learned that I definitely over pruned. I have a large number of fruit clusters, but this is likely from a stress response and not sustainable healthy growth. The tomatoes I have may struggle to grow and ripen with too few leaves making sugar. I will fertilize and try to encourage more leafy growth. It’s indeterminate so I have until about early November to get these growing and ripened up. And next year I’ll know more and do a better job.
Oh and because people are making incorrect assumptions, this is five tomato plants, each with either two or three leaders. I also understand that I’ve overcrowded the space.
by slowfrito
16 Comments
They look way overpruned :/ you should only prune off the suckers (the new branches that form at a 45 degree angle between the main stem and a side branch with leaves). You should’ve left the branches with leaves as this is what the plant uses to photosynthesize… and without leaves to photosynthesis, the plant cant create sugars to feed itself.
Leave those poor babies alone! Way over pruned!!
Look what they did to ma boy
[deleted]
Cheesey rice
Yes I’m afraid way over pruned, but that’s also far too many tomatoes in that space. I think I counted 12 tomatoes and a few peppers in approximately a 3 sqft area?
If you left the plant to its own devices (but pruned off the bottom leaves to prevent disease), you’d have gotten more tomatoes with just 2 plants in that area, 12 is too many.
Are you fertilizing? Tomatoes are pretty heavy feeders and having that many so close is probably draining the soul of all its nutrients quickly. They need to grow more leaves to photosynthesize and help your tomatoes ripen.
Gardening is a learning experience, and even long time gardeners still have much to learn so don’t be hard on yourself, and enjoy your harvest when they ripen.
Man..I’m not going to lie. They look sad. They look like they’ve been tortured. Stop worrying about pruning to direct the nutrients. You’re having the opposite effect. Your tomato is going oh shit I can’t produce enough energy to support these fruit, must focus what little energy I have to put out new leaves so I can then produce enough energy to reproduce. That probably why your fruit production is so low. If you want to do single leader watch a few videos on it. Otherwise you’d probably have more success not pruning it at all.
I’m more worried about them being so leggy and about the close spacing than the pruning, I would put one plant in that space where you’ve put all those.
Overpruned. Leave them alone.
I don’t know that I’d say you over pruned. You did prune extremely aggressively. I wouldn’t prune them any more. But I think otherwise they look ok. Depending on your zone/region I’ve actually found it can be hard to push your SMs to produce an abundance of fruit and not just plant. So on the plus side you were successful there! I’d maybe hit them with a tomato fertilizer to make sure they’ve got the nutrients they need to develop large quality tomatoes and leave them alone otherwise. Here’s a photo of mine, which aren’t that different – though as others have noted – a bit less pruned.
https://preview.redd.it/or2l8z4mk89h1.jpeg?width=4284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eec7cf70989952c44434c30dd208471822f478c8
Omg, how many are there and how they’re still not only alive but even fruiting a bit!
(If you would plant one plant in this space and let it grow, it could have brought you more fruit than this army of pale worms)
Way too many plants for that space.
there’s a lot going on here. seems like you pruned off too many of the leaf clusters. yes it can be good to prune off the ones that are 6in from soil to reduce the chances of soil born diseases, but you did it too far up and hurt the plant. I think you confused leaf clusters for suckers. high density planting / very tight spacing requires a specific pruning technique, and you can be rewarded with early, heavy yields per sqft. but also these are smaller than I’d expect for almost July in zone 7.
the good news is it seems like you have an indeterminate strain of san marzanos, so they will be able to recover. tomatoes can take a lot of abuse and still put out a good harvest.
edit: I’m not trying to portray myself as the tomato expert or whatever lol, and this post was my first time trying the high density planting method years ago, so I’ve learned a lot since then. I’m just showing you an example of tomatoes using that method that aren’t over-pruned. since a lot of comments don’t seem to be familiar with the method and are telling you that the issue is that you have too many plants in the space, when that’s not what’s going on here. https://www.reddit.com/r/vegetablegardening/s/FveVprkho1
Stop pruning. Plants need leaves to make food. There is so much bad advice about pruning.
For beginners, don’t even bother with it… The plants will end up looking like this.
Definitely overpruned.
I don’t even remove the suckers, as they grow into branches with even more fruit on (more than the times I *did* prune the suckers… I guess I was the sucker back then).
For example, I have 3 vining beefsteak tomato plants at the moment, and the 3 of them have more tomatoes on them than your plants there do, and I know the san marzano plants usually have more tomatoes on than my beefsteaks should.
They will grow more leaves, but I suggest you put the shears away now.
You will have better luck next year, now that you know now! Gardening is a learning journey!
They were fucked from the start when you put, what, five tomatoes into two square feet? That’s not even including the peppers sharing the same space. Not nearly enough room for them.
I would argue the pruning might have helped. You’ve drastically reduced their ability to grow, which is good if your goal was to fit as many plants in as short a space as possible. If your goal was fruit? Not so good.
Next year, plan for one tomato plant per three square feet. You can single leader if you want, but it is not necessary the best option if you’re not scaling to hundreds of plants. Double leader would do you better. I would not prune leaves above 2 feet from the ground.