Suckering tomatoes
 

All of my first planting of tomatoes got zapped by frost and now all the side shoots AKA suckers have popped and have created a beautiful bush of tomatoes...all 70 plants. What do I do with them now? leave the nicest sucker, leave 2 suckers, the bottom ones, or top ones...I have never had this happen so I am a t a bit of quandary as to what to do. Please tell me. They are all hybrids, too. No heirlooms in this row.

I'm sure you will get a wide range of comments so I will just post what works for me. If the plants are determinate, I wouldn't do anything to them.

However, if they are indeterminate, I usually remove any suckers below the first fruit set or blossoms. Anything above the first fruit set or blossoms, I just let them continue to grow.

oops! wrong button

[QUOTE=Mark0820;357353]I'm sure you will get a wide range of comments so I will just post what works for me. If the plants are determinate, I wouldn't do anything to them.

However, if they are indeterminate, I usually remove any suckers below the first fruit set or blossoms. Anything above the first fruit set or blossoms, I just let them continue to grow.[/QUOTE]
These are semi inderterminate and indeterminates. big beef, celebrity, ultra pink, goliath. I have about 4 -6 nice suckers all the same size forming a bush. I am thinking I should start pulling the suckers off soon as they are the size of a regular tomato stem, maybe 1/2" in diameter for each sucker. I forget to say there is no central stem. the tip froze out.

Are there any blossoms or fruit on the plants?

Just pick the two or three suckers that seem to be more firmly attached to the stem and pull off the rest. I did this with several of my plants earlier this year and they have done fine. The reason you want to see which ones seem to be the best attached is sometimes suckers are very weakly attached to the stem and as they get larger they will break off. You also want to tie them up so they are supported.

Bill

No blossoms or fruit yet., Mark.

b54red, they are in cages, so they are supported, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to do the wrong thing with them before I started. thanks

I'm not certain there is necessarily a right or wrong answer to your question. Since the main stem was damaged, it does make the situation a little more unusual. Clearly, you don't want any suckers that are just a few inches above the ground.

My first fruit set is usually around 9 - 12 inches above the ground. I'm not sure how tall your plants are, but I would probably remove any sucker that is below 9 - 12 inches (unless the entire plant is smaller than that size). After that, it is probably a little more personal preference. The more you prune the fewer tomatoes you will get. Some will say you will also get larger tomatoes by pruning more. I would probably just remove the lowest suckers and use your best judgement as to whether you keep 1, 2 or 3 stems to grow.

The Celebrity is a little more complicated because you really don't want to prune a determinate or semi-determinate very much. Since they set most of their fruit all at one time, you can really reduce your harvest by pruning.

I topped 2 plants that were wilting this year, they were 2 feet tall when I did it. They both came back just fine. I am pretty sure if you do nothing they will do fine and if you do something they will do just as good. I have learned that tomatoes are easy to grow, you can cut them back to nothing and they will just come back.

Good luck,

- Virtex

Just to clarify, my comments in post #8 are relative to how tall the main stem was before it was damaged.

For example, if the main stem was only 6 inches tall, then obviously you need to keep at least one sucker below 6 inches. The shorter the main stem, the fewer the suckers I would be inclined to keep. Then as those stems grew, I would just let the suckers off of those new stems grow.

[QUOTE=Mark0820;357385]Just to clarify, my comments in post #8 are relative to how tall the main stem was before it was damaged.

For example, if the main stem was only 6 inches tall, then obviously you need to keep at least one sucker below 6 inches. The shorter the main stem, the fewer the suckers I would be inclined to keep. Then as those stems grew, I would just let the suckers off of those new stems grow.[/QUOTE]
The plants were put out the same week the freeze came. They were maybe 8-12" tall. just beautiful! Then we had two freezes at the end of May and these survived, but the center was frozen out and now they are about 15-18" tall and bushy. The top one or two suckers are on stems that are very thin, but the bottom suckers (much closer to the ground) are really nice, but I just have never had 70ish plants to take my chances on getting a crop off from, that look like this.

Tomorrow I will just start thinning to see what happens, no matter how I go about it.:dizzy:

If the main stem is thin, you definitely want to keep the sturdy suckers at the bottom of the plant. Otherwise the stem probably won't support the plant.

I probably wouldn't prune the Celebrities or any other semi-determinate plants you have, but that is just me.

2 and 3 stem examples, in pictures (some people do this on
purpose, without the frost to force it):

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

(I did not have the patience to paste the whole thing into
Google Translate, and when I pasted the URL, it did nothing.)

Good site, I'm following it (well, as much as I follow anything) for my raised beds for Fall. I want my garden to look as neat and productive as b54red's!

I don't know in Firefox or IE, but in Chrome, it offers at the top to translate for you when you visit a page not in your native language.

And you can always google "Tomodori" and click the "translate this page" link under the result title. :)

That seemed to work (Firefox). First I tried having Google translate
the tomodori.com front page. I had to tell Firefox to allow a redirection
(I have Firefox preferences set so that Firefox pops up a box warning about redirections, and I have to click on it to allow the particular
redirection), then the translation took a couple of minutes, but I
could read the Tomodori front page and links from it in English.

Then I tried having Google search for "tomodori" *and* a quoted
phrase from the pruning page (in French). Google returned the page
as a result, and I selected "translate". Again, I had to allow the
redirection, and I am "still waiting" on the translation. (I may try that
again. I may have got the timing off some way and hung something
in the Google Translate back end.)

Ah, here we go, the Tomodori pruning page automatically translated
from French to English:
[url]http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.tomodori.com/3culture/taill_sur_2-tiges.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3DTomodori%2B%2522La%2Btaille%2Bdes%2Btomates%2Bsur%2Bplusieurs%2Btiges%2522%26lr%3D%26cr%3DcountryFR%26hl%3Den%26as_qdr%3Dall%26biw%3D991%26bih%3D573%26tbs%3Dctr:countryFR[/url]

(Seems like it loses a little something in translation, but there is still
enough there to be sure that you are understanding the pictures.)