I’m a convert to Team No-Prune 1000%.

For years I had read the dogma about pruning suckers on tomatoes. A friend I respected a lot who was a veteran gardener also preached it religiously. (Past tense because he passed away some years back)

But sometimes the plants would still get away from me if I didn't check them often enough and still go wild.

I always felt like they looked happier when they were more wild. But I still believed the dogma. But I never noticed an increase in yield or quality of tomatoes on the plants that were more pruned. If anything they seemed weaker and I often had more trouble with disease or plants dying early the more pruned they were.

When I joined this group I saw several successful gardeners saying they don't prune. Since I already had doubts about the pruning dogma, I decided this year I wasn't going to prune my plants at all. Just let them grow when where and how they wanted to grow.

I did cut back anything touching the ground or leaves/branches that yellowed. But everything else I just let grow as much as it pleased.

And wow I will never go back to pruning ever again. I have the happiest healthiest tomato plants I have ever had. My yields have been outrageous. We've been eating fresh ripe tomatoes directly off the vine every day for the last 6+ weeks. And still can't keep up with the production. And anyone who has claimed the tomato quality or tomato size goes down, that has also proven untrue. Again, I always seemed to get smaller sadder tomatoes off the vines that were more pruned. My tomatoes this year are bigger than anything I've ever grown. Even my sungolds are fat and happy.

Today we picked the 4th basket of ripe tomatoes in the past week, even after all the ones we eat daily off the vines. And there are still tomatoes to pick. And there are hundreds more green babies growing.

This afternoon we're canning salsa with everything we picked today. We usually don't have enough for salsa until at least a month after this. This is the earliest we've had enough extra to make salsa.