Organic Tomato Magic??
 

I received an email from someone touting a new book recommending pruning all but three leaves from a plant to supposedly double the fruit set and harvest. Anyone here know anything about the book or the methods he described. I might be pretty gullible but will do nothing when it comes to my Tomatoes till is passes before the board of experts here on Tomatoville. I understand about the soil,water and airflow but drastic pruning seems over the top. Any comments please
ron

Yes, it has been around a while. It is full of misinformation, and the author doesn't seem to really know much about tomatoes (or even grow them himself), he is just selling a story about how well his grandfather grew them in a greenhouse in Poland and telling us that it is the only way to grow tomatoes. You can download it for free through a backdoor if you google organic tomato magic.

This excuse of a book is a recipe for disaster. I'm attaching it here, but only as an example/reference of what [U][B]NOT[/B] to do to your plants[/U]. :shock:

If pruning all the leaves off a tomato plant produces thousands more tomatoes, it would still do me no good.

What would I do with thousands of sunburned tomatoes?

I purchased the book and after seeing what his secrets were, Using cow manure and growing in a greenhouse plus stripping the plants of it's leaves I promptly requested and got a refund. When he replied back to me as to why, I told him cow crap and greenhouses were no secrets and stripping all the leaves off the plant but a few was just plain stupid. Never heard from him again. Ami

I've read the book on the Internet & Don't believe a word of it!

LarryD

Thats plenty good enough for me. Its about what I expected to hear. Thanks to all who replied and to Mischka for the link. I guess I will still do it the hard way outside in a garden.
ron

close this thread for my part, Im done

[SIZE="5"][/SIZE]Don't forget...a tomato isn't a tomato either.

[COLOR="Red"][SIZE="4"]IT'S A GENETICALLY DEFORMED MUTANT!!![/SIZE][/COLOR]

Note: a study some years ago at UCDavis found that
*moderate* pruning produced earlier fruitset on average.
(My guess: the plant reacted to it as if light levels were
dropping and started setting fruit in anticipation of fall.)

This was probably in an environment with near ideal
temperatures for fruit set, so the timing of first fruit set
was more dependent on the plant's genetics and less on
the weather.

In some parts of Europe, pruning tomato plants is standard
operating procudure:

[url]http://www.tomodori.com/3culture/taill_sur_2-tiges.htm[/url]

In this sort of tomato culture, growers likely have a target number
of fruit per plant that they consider ideal for producing the
best marketable fruit, so the extra branches that they prune
off would not be useful anyway. In the illustrations, they are
not pruning leaves, just extra side-shoots that come up in the
crotches between the main stems and the leaves. They also
top the main stems that remain once the plant gets to what
they consider mature size to accelerate ripening of the
remaining fruit on the plant.

This is nothing like "pruning off all but a few leaves". The
plant still retains enough foliage to protect the fruit from
sunscald. There is a method called "Missouri pruning"
where the side branches are allowed to produce a set of
leaves before the tips on those side shoots are pruned (more
leaf area for photosynthesis and sun protection without
producing more fruit clusters).

I wouldn't call the tomodori (French) method pruning as it is more like training the plants to more than one main stem. They do remove the suckers except where they want to start a new growth/stem. They top the plants because they know new fruit developing above a certain height will not mature before the growing season is over thus diverting the nutrients to the existing fruits on the plants. Ami

I think the idea of the method described on the tomodori site is to slow down/spread the production of ripe fruits.