On last week's Q&A, I talked about what to do with your tomato plants that have overgrown themselves.

And I realized that I used a couple of terms that may be unfamiliar to you.

I really try to check myself on that because I know not everyone who is listening to this

are familiar with some of the more common terms that we use in gardening,

especially if you're brand new, but I just didn't catch it in time. To be honest with you,

squeezing in these episodes has been a little bit of a challenge because my husband's working

from home and will be for the next several months. We share an office space and getting time to

record has been a bit of a challenge. So he was actually,

I think, eating lunch and I was trying to get this recorded really quickly. And obviously, I completely

missed that I needed to define those terms. So let's talk about a tomato leader. Because when we

talk about topping off a tomato I mentioned cutting the

leader let's talk about what a leader is a leader is the main stem of the tomato plant

we're specifically talking about indeterminate tomatoes those are the ones that produced for you

all season long that just continue to grow until frost or disease stops them. These are not

romas. These are not the determinate tomatoes that grow to a specific height and then produce all

their fruit. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about indeterminate tomatoes when we're

talking about topping off. So back to the leader. It's the central main stem. Off of the leader, you're going to notice

with your tomato plants that you have offshoots or stems, and those are going to be producing

leaves, and then in between the main stem, which has the leader at the top, and the side shoots, you will have suckers. Now, a lot of

people will pinch off those suckers because those suckers will eventually form main stems. So,

hopefully this is not too confusing, but I will put a link in the show notes where I talk about

pruninguning and I

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