STOP REMOVING TOMATO SUCKERS It s Killing Your Tomato Plants

This is a tomato sucker. It grows out of the crotch, or the node, of a tomato plant. This once was a sucker growing out of the crotch of a main stem, but it was allowed to continue to grow, and it has turned into its own main stem. This is a sucker who got suckered into removing those suckers, and as a result, lost a tremendous amount of their tomato production, and I don't want you to get suckered into removing your suckers like I got suckered into. And on today's video, I want to explain to you why removing suckers is for suckers. Poorly produced, regurgitated gardening content has created an epidemic of unnecessary tomato plant pruning, and on today's video, I want to convince you to stop pruning your plants, or at least reduce the pruning dramatically, because it's not only killing our plant's production, but it is killing the plants themselves. If you're new to the channel, please subscribe, hit the bell for notifications, and check out my Amazon store and Spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom apparel and gear. There are essentially four different types of tomato plants. Indeterminate, semi-determinate, determinate, and dwarf tomatoes. The only tomato type where it is somewhat debatable if it's okay to remove some suckers is indeterminate tomatoes. When it comes to the other three types, you should never, ever, ever, for any reason, ever remove any suckers. Ever. That is because indeterminate tomatoes are the only tomato type that is a true vine, so they can recover from some sucker removal. All the other types grow as a bush for the majority, if not their entire lifespan, and sucker removal will destroy your harvest. This is a determinate tomato. It is called a determinate tomato because it grows as a bush to a predetermined height. As you can see, this whole tomato is only about three feet tall, and it will not grow any taller than this. It has reached its maximum height, and it has already produced all of its flowers because it tops out. And all of these individual nodes that produce the flowers grow off of the suckers. So if you remove any of the suckers, well, the suckers are the side shoots that produce the bush form that actually creates all of the vegetation that has the flowers. So sucker removal means you remove all the parts of the plant that flower. You can never, ever remove suckers from a determinate tomato for any reason, or you destroy the harvest. And as you can see, there's really no need to because it grows so neat and compact. And if you're wondering, by the way, what this amazingly productive small variety is called, it is called Bobcat, and I recommend it highly. This is a semi-determinate tomato. Semi-determinate tomatoes begin their life as a vine for the first couple of feet. So for that reason, a lot of gardeners mistakenly start removing suckers. But the problem is, after the first couple of feet, they start producing suckers in excess and bushing out. So you get this really, really bushy form that at the end of the day resembles a really tall determinate tomato. And while they can still grow indeterminately a bit, they make a lot of side shoots and that is where their flowers are. So once again, for semi-determinate varieties, you do not want to ever remove any suckers because that is where all the fruit is produced. They're produced off of the flowers that come off the suckers. So if you remove the suckers, you will have an inferior harvest. And by the way, if you again are wondering what this amazing productive variety of semi-determinate tomato is called, it is called Celebrity Plus. Dwarf tomatoes like these Rosella purple tomatoes right here also grow as a bush. Whether your dwarf tomatoes are labeled determinate or indeterminate, they all bush out and they produce ample suckers on the side and that is what supplies all of the flowers. So if you remove any suckers from your dwarf tomatoes, once again, you are not going to get any fruit. You cannot remove suckers from them for any reason. I have not removed one single sucker from this entire bed of tomatoes right here. And as a result, the flowering is absolutely extreme. There are just hundreds and hundreds of flowers everywhere you look. The clusters are everywhere and this is a result of not pruning and allowing as many suckers to grow as possible. Because the more suckers you get, the more main stems you're going to get, the more offshoots you're going to get that have lots and lots of tomato clusters. The more unpruned you run, the more flower clusters you are going to get. Here is one of the most extreme examples. There are just massive amounts of flowers forming in this little area right here. It is tremendous and some of these tomato plants are starting to get pretty big. This one is already up to six feet tall and there are lots of fruits forming deep in there and they are really protected from the pests and from the sun. The only tomato type where it is sometimes reasonable to remove suckers are indeterminate types because indeterminate tomatoes grow as a vine throughout their entire life so they can recover from sucker removal. But that being said, if you are listening to the internet, you are almost certainly dramatically overpruning your plants and way overdoing the sucker removal. Because the truth is, 100% of the time, removing suckers is going to stress out the plant, increase your risk of disease, and in many cases, lead to substantially less fruit on your vines. And I can prove it. Now to be clear, I don't do zero pruning on my indeterminate tomatoes. As you can see, I have begun the pruning process on the majority of them and I do remove the lowest leaves on the plant for about the first 12 to 16 inches or below the first flower cluster. And that is because I do find that leaves that drag on the ground are very, very prone to leaf diseases like early blight and leaf spot. As an example, you can see what I'm talking about here. I have not pruned this tomato plant at all and the very lowest leaves are starting to show signs of early blight right there. So for that reason, I do recommend you prune off the lowest leaves on the plant. But that is the only universal pruning that I recommend for indeterminate tomato plants. Other than that, I can't seriously recommend any other blanket pruning statement because pruning for the most part is dramatically overblown and we are all removing way too many suckers for our plant and it is killing our productivity. Watch this. This right here is a classic indeterminate tomato and as you can see, I pruned off the first foot or so of branches in order to prevent any leaves from dragging on the ground and getting early blight as I showed. But after that, I have run mainly unpruned on this tomato. This right here is the first sucker that came off the main stem of the plant and I allowed it to grow and it has turned into its own main stem. This right here was the original main stem. This is the first sucker that grew into its own main stem and if you go up on the plant, you will notice right here you have two clusters of flowers and they are both forming at the exact same spot on the plant. And that behavior is simply hard-coded into the DNA of the plant. No matter how many main stems your tomato plant has, they are all going to produce flowers at very similar spacing. So if you have two main stems, you are going to have twice as many flowers as if you have one main stem. If you have three main stems, you are going to have three times as many flowers as if you have one main stem. If you have four main stems, you're going to have four times as many flowers, etc. etc. etc. At least in theory. In practice, you're to have to give a plant with four main stems more fertilizer than a plant with one main stem because the plant's going to be bigger and demand more food. But as long as you're giving it enough fertilizer, a plant with four main stems is going to blow away a single stem plant in terms of production. And that is because when you limit a plant to only one main stem, you are reducing the plant to a minimum in terms of the amount of leaves it can produce and the amount of flowers it can produce. Plant food is not fertilizer. Plant food is made by the plant via the process of photosynthesis. So the more leaves a plant has, the leaves of the solar panels of the plant, the more sunlight they can absorb, the more they can photosynthesize, the more plant food they can make endogenously. And as long as we are keeping up with their fertilizer needs, a plant that is allowed to bush out and grow a lot of leaf nodes and grow very large is going to cream the performance of a scraggly single-stemmed vine. You're also going to eliminate so many more problems when you have a bushy plant that is allowed to bush out with many suckers. A lot of tomatoes we lose because of pest damage and sun scald. And a single-stemmed vine with limited vegetation is going to have all of the fruits on it exposed to damage from the sun and also they're going to be easy targets for insects, birds, and squirrels. If we allow the suckers to form, we can create a bushy plant that hides the fruit. And that not only insulates it from sun damage and prevents sun scald, but it makes it harder for the pests to find. So you're going to have a more productive plant with more flower clusters that's able to better protect its fruit and the yields are going to crush that of a single-stemmed tomato plant. But it gets even worse. When we prune tomato plants, we open up the protective skin of the tomato plants and we open up the mucous membranes to pathogens, which makes it a lot easier to spread diseases on our plants. And also, pruning creates lots of stress on the plant. So not only does it slow down its growth because it has to recover from the trauma of being pruned, but you actually weaken its defenses in the stressed-out state, which once again makes it more prone to disease. So when you prune a tomato plant or unnecessarily remove suckers, not only are you creating a situation where the plant has the minimum number of flowers and the minimum capable fruit set, but you're also creating all of these open wounds on the plants that you're then taking your dirty pruning shears, which are impossible to fully sanitize, and then you're moving them from plant to plant and cut to cut, injecting pathogens directly into the mucous membranes of the plants, all the while putting it in a stressed-out state, so they will be most likely to contract disease that you're just spreading around like wildfire all willy-nilly. But hold on. What happens if I just take the suckers when they're this little size and just pinch them off? There's no way that's harming the plant. Well, while it is true that if you pinch off the suckers when they're really tiny like that, you are minimizing the pruning stress and minimizing the size of the broken mucous membrane, you're still creating some amount of stress, and you're still creating an entry point for pathogens. And you may be able to do that with your plants when they're really small and stay on top of them, but come the middle of the season, they're going to be producing several suckers a day, and you're just not going to be able to stay on top of it. So at that point, you're going to have to either let them get really bushy, like I'm generally recommending, or you're going to have to start taking scissors and pruning off larger suckers, and you're just going to create lots of stress and more damage. So where did this new culture of going crazy with sucker removal suddenly come from? Well, I personally think it is confusion based on how commercial growers grow their tomatoes. First off, when it comes to field-grown tomatoes, commercial-grown tomatoes, outdoors that we buy in grocery stores, almost all of the field-grown varieties out there are determinate varieties, because determinate varieties are small and they require minimal staking. It doesn't make any sense to grow indeterminate tomatoes outdoors in fields, because they require so much tying and staking, the labor cost would be astronomical. Indeterminate tomatoes are grown commercially in greenhouses, and I think this is how the whole single-stemming and sucker removal craze got started. Almost all of the indeterminate tomatoes that are grown for commercial production are done inside greenhouses, and greenhouse square footage is extremely expensive, because it is very limited. Well, in order for the economics to work inside of greenhouses, growers have to make use of vertical space. So what they do is, they grow indeterminate tomato plants very closely together, only about 8 to 12 inches in high density, then they prune them and they single-stem them up strings or trellises all the way to the top of the greenhouse purlins, which are about 16 to 20 feet tall. Because the square footage, the surface area, is so expensive, they have to make use of that air space, that volume, in order to turn a profit. So they grow them really, really tall, up single stems, and remove all those suckers to keep them as a single, organized vine, so they can grow them all the way to the tops of the roofs and maximize their production. So I think some gardeners came along and they said, hey, that's a great way that they grow inside greenhouses, let's emulate that system inside our backyard gardens. And I can tell you this firsthand, as being a YouTube creator, what often happens is, somebody sees a new concept out there, and then they recreate those videos, and then somebody recreates that, and before you know it, there's a whole bunch of regurgitated content that all says the same thing, and then the viewers see all of these videos being shared everywhere from all these different creators, and they say, well, it must be true, there's so much of the same information out there. But here's the problem. While this is a great concept in theory, what works inside in commercial greenhouses doesn't work in backyard gardens. In commercial greenhouses, they can support these plants to 16 to 20 feet tall, but we can't do that in our backyard gardens. We struggle to support them more than six to seven feet, so it's actually advantageous for our plants to bush out, because we backyard gardeners can better support the horizontal space than we can the vertical space. We're limited with how tall we can string or support them. The other thing that doesn't work is, inside an indoor environment, you have very limited disease and almost no pests. They're spraying for insects like crazy inside your greenhouses, and they also have a controlled rainless environment, where disease is not an issue, because it's so dry and well ventilated. Well, when you have these vines that are growing up tall, they become wind magnets, so the wind beats them up and mangles them, and also, you have all these open wounds from all this pruning that you have to do, and you have rainfall and humidity that is spreading disease like wildfire. So the simple fact of the matter is, shorter, bushier plants are less prone to wind damage outside, and less pruned or totally unpruned plants are actually less susceptible to disease. So all of these things that work in a controlled indoor environment don't work as well outdoors. So for all of these reasons, when it comes to growing indeterminate tomato varieties in a backyard garden, in almost all cases, pruning less and removing suckers less is more. The more main stems you allow your plants to grow, the more flower clusters you are going to have, the more fruits you are going to have overall, and the more production you are going to have per plant. And for many of us, this is a very good thing, because we can't really support our plants beyond 6 or 7 feet in terms of vertical space, and they're easier to support horizontally if we allow them to bush out a little bit more. So take advantage of that space horizontally. And in the long run, you will generally have less disease, and your plants will be less stressed out, whereas the vegetation is more likely to protect the plants from pests and sun scalds, and things like that as well. You will get much larger harvests in general. Now that being said, are there any scenarios where it is a good idea to remove lots of suckers or grow them as a single stem? Yes, I can think of a few scenarios where it's a smart idea. The first one is if you have your own greenhouse or high tunnel, or you specifically invented a very, very tall trellis that is built to single stem the tomato plants and keep them out of the weather. If that is the case, you can grow single stem tomato plants in very high density in a controlled environment that prevents sun scald and disease spread and things like that. Number two, another good idea I could think of is if you're just trying to set a record for huge fruit. When you single stem tomato plants, you limit the flower clusters so your tomato plants are going to set less fruit overall. And when you have less fruit on your tomato plants, they can grow to a larger size because you're spreading that energy over a smaller and smaller crop. It's the same concept as thinning your fruit trees. When you remove fruit, you're going to get larger average fruit. Now, I generally don't recommend this because I have found that the bigger the fruit, the more likely they are to crack or split, the more likely they are to be attacked by pests because they have to sit on the vine longer to ripen, and they're more likely to get sun scald. They're also more likely to have issues ripening properly. You get uneven ripening on very, very large fruits, and they find them to be overall less desirable. I like a nice average size fruit. They have the highest quality in my opinion. But that being said, if you're just going for bragging rights, in that case, removing flower clusters and limiting the number of main stems and removing the suckers is probably a good idea. Another reason I could think of that you may want to remove suckers is if you have a very short season climate where disease is not really an issue. So say you're growing in the northern tier of the country, and it's really difficult for you to grow beefsteak tomatoes. Well, in that case, you may want to limit the size of your plants to one main stem and really regulate how many flower clusters are there so it doesn't set too many fruits because you need them to ripen as quickly as possible, and the less fruits there are on a plant, the faster they can ripen in theory. So short season climates where disease isn't an issue, it could be a really good idea. And the fourth reason I can think of is, let's say your season is coming to an end and you have frost that's imminent within 45 days, and you don't care if the plants get diseased. You still have lots of green tomatoes and you want to ripen that crop. Well, in that case, it may be a good idea to pull off all the excess suckers, start topping the tomato plants and don't let them grow anymore from a vegetative standpoint and waste that energy to grow more branches or leaves up top or suckering. You really want to ripen that crop that is on there. If that is the case, then sucker removal makes a lot of sense. But for most of us, where we want the most productive tomato plants possible, especially early in the growing season where we have plenty of warm weather ahead and ripening is not an issue, generally speaking, it is a bad idea to remove suckers, especially in the first half of the season when we want our plants to set a really big crop. And that is why I believe the vast majority of backyard gardeners today are over-pruning their indeterminate tomato plants. And if you don't believe me, just try running this experiment side by side. Take half of your tomatoes and do what you normally do if you're a heavy tomato pruner or a sucker remover, and then try the other half my way, where you keep pruning limited to just the bottom foot or so of the plants, and then you let a lot of the suckers turn into main stems and you let them bush out more and support them more horizontally. Then compare the plants side by side, which ones were more productive and healthier for a longer period of time. I've run this experiment for years and I am a strong believer in not pruning your tomato plants as much as possible. I find that they live a lot longer, produce a lot more, and the fruit is more symmetric and a higher quality. What say you? And that right there is my thesis on pruning and everything I've experienced in the last decade growing tomatoes here in the coastal Carolinas, and I hope that you found the information in this video valuable. If you did find it valuable, please make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and please ring the notification bell so you're notified when I release more videos like these, and share it with family and friends that you know that love growing tomatoes. Hopefully it helps them. I placed direct links down in the video description to all of my favorite products that I use in my yard and garden to grow tomatoes. For everything else I use in real life in my yard and garden to grow everything, that is all linked in my Amazon storefront in the video description. While you're down there, check out my website, themillennialgardener.com, for all things gardening and custom home design merch if you want to support my channel. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope to see all of you again on the next video. Dale, this may be one of the craziest things I have ever seen. Are you seeing what I'm looking at? There is like a gator turtle party over there. Hold on. The gator is now slinking back into the water, but they are just a bunch of turtles that they were sitting on top of the gator. Wow. See, people think that gators are aggressive, but I don't really find them to be all that aggressive, Dale. I've been looking at them every day for almost a decade now, and I'm constantly impressed by how non-aggressive they are. See, look, now that gator is gone. No, he's still there. I can see the gator head poking out of the water, but those turtles and that gator were just hanging out. What do you think about that, buddy? I'm thinking there must be something pretty good on that little stick right there. Dale is reading his pee mails for the day.