84 - Tomatoes to Prune or Not to Prune

The Beginner's Garden with Jill McSheehy

Jill McSheehy

Gardening, Garden, How To, Education, Organicgardening, Home & Garden, Leisure, Homegardening, Beginninggardener, Vegetablegardening

4.4 • 734 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do tomato plants need to be pruned?

In my first years of gardening, it seemed everyone told me, "yes." But as I gained more experience and began listening to other gardening experts, I learned that the answer to this question isn't as clear as you'd think.

People get passionate about tomato pruning. But I started asking myself, "why?"

Is it because this is the way they've always done it? Because their mom or grandpa told them that's the best way to care for tomatoes? Or are people pruning tomatoes (or not pruning) based on their own experience and tests?

It seemed everywhere I turned I received conflicting information, so I did what I encourage every gardener to do. I tested it in my own garden.The results were so clear to me that I'll never look at pruning tomato plants the same way again.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Beginners Garden podcast. I'm Jill McShehehehe with Journey Withjil.net,
0:06.1	and my goal is to give beginning gardeners the tools they need to grow a rewarding, productive garden. To prune or not to prune, that is the question.
0:33.8	We're going to be talking all about pruning tomatoes today on the beginner's garden podcast.
0:39.0	And I want to welcome you here, if this is your first time to the show, and welcome to my regular listeners.
0:44.6	I certainly hope wherever you are in your garden season or wherever you are in the world, that this episode will be chock full of good information to help you decide what's right for you
0:56.5	in your garden.
0:58.5	I'll never forget my first season gardening, and I had a few people that came to look at my
1:04.0	new garden plot, and they saw my tomatoes growing, and they made the very specific point of
1:10.4	showing me my tomato suckers and how I needed to pinch
1:13.6	them off. Absolutely no question you had to pinch those suckers off. Now, if you don't know what I'm
1:19.4	talking about, I'm going to explain it to you in just a second. But the reason why we're having this
1:24.6	discussion today is that I'm the type of person that I do want to do
1:29.2	the right thing, and I do want to follow whatever other people have found that works for them.
1:36.0	But I also don't want to go into anything blindly and just take everybody's advice just as base
1:42.7	value. As to assume that just because it's always been done a
1:47.1	certain way, then that's the way that I need to do it. I want to be discerting and questioning
1:52.7	of whatever I'm doing in my garden. And I'm hoping that you're the same way. I'm not going to
1:59.7	pretend that this episode is going to be the be all end all in the tomato way. I'm not going to pretend that this episode is going to be the be-all-end-all in
2:04.0	the tomato pruning debate. But what I'm hoping to do is to share with you the benefits of
2:10.7	pruning your tomatoes, the drawbacks of pruning your tomatoes, and then also how where you live
2:16.9	might affect what decision you make, and also other variables in your tomatoes. And then also how where you live might affect what decision you make
2:19.4	and also other variables in your garden specifically. And then I'm also going to share with you
	...

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