- Welcome back to "Jacques in the Garden."
Today we are going to be talking
about a much requested topic,
and that is tomato pruning 101.
We're going to keep it pretty simple,
but I wanna focus on the context, because in my garden,
I have multiple different growing conditions,
and I know that at home,
you guys all have different growing conditions.
So we're going to focus
on pruning for the context of your space.
We're gonna start with these tomatoes right here.
Before we actually get into the pruning itself,
let's talk a little bit
about what tools I'm gonna be using today.
So in particular, today I've chosen the Felco 14s.
These are currently my favorite pruners.
They're actually technically designed for small hands.
You could see they're quite small.
The nice thing that I really like about them is
that they are very dextrous.
They don't take up a lot of space,
they're easy to get into tight spaces,
and they're very easy to sharpen.
So I have them on my holster right here.
I also have a sharpening tool, so this is the Felco 905.
The thing I like about this, and I'll show you guys
in a second is that they have angled guidestones here,
so when you put this on your pruner, you just pull it,
and it pretty much gets the angle exactly right.
So I like to keep my pruner sharp.
That's why I always carry that around.
And then the last tool that I will occasionally reach
for is my hawk's bill knife.
It's a great pruning knife
for just coming in and doing very close work.
I don't know why,
sometimes it just feels good to use a knife. (chuckles)
And then the last little bonus thing that I'll mention is
that lately I've been carrying
around a little sprayer of alcohol, which I have set down
somewhere and I'll show you guys in a second,
but it's just a matter of sanitizing your equipment
between each tomato plant,
and of course, the trusted bucket.
So with that being said, let's talk a little bit
about how to actually prune these tomatoes,
and why my tomatoes, in particular right here,
appear to have no leaves.
What's happening in this particular bed is that I have
three plants on this side, and they are strung up on string.
So this is originally single stem trellis,
but as they grow up and bigger,
I tend to start supporting multiple vines.
So this Sungold originally was two, turned into four.
So I tend to let my tomatoes get a little bit bigger
than is originally planned,
but as they grow up in this sort of environment,
I am removing all the leaves below the ripening clusters.
The reason why I'm doing this is that
this tomato is now quite dated.
It went into ground around April,
so now that it's mid-June,
they have topped out on the trellis,
and all the foliage down here was months old.
Any tomato plant, once it gets a couple months old,
the leaves are just going to naturally get some disease
and start dying back.
In my particular climate context,
I am only two miles away from the coastline.
I get a lot of coastal fog, especially in the early summer
and late spring, which leads to powdery mildew
and all sorts of other diseases.
If I did not prune this off,
this tomato would look like an absolute disaster.
It would be covered in disease,
my fruit probably wouldn't be setting properly,
and that's just why it looks like this.
The other thing I wanted to mention, though, is that
where this bed is situated,
I have a giant jacaranda tree, I have my house over here,
and in the late afternoon,
there is no direct sun on these fruit.
So I purposely left these on here
so that you could see that in their fully-ripened state,
they have no sun scald whatsoever.
Now, if you're growing somewhere
where these tomatoes are facing south, or they have
a very high exposure, they probably will get sunburned
if you prune them 'em this hard, but in my growing context,
I know this particular area doesn't get late afternoon sun,
and I know that I have coastal fog, so I have to prune them.
So my basic theory is that as soon
as a tomato is fully set and begins ripening,
I wanna remove all leaves underneath it.
That's why it looks like this, and even as you come up,
I am starting to actually see a little bit
of powdery mildew creep up on these leaves,
but as I reach the top,
all the new growth is powdery mildew free.
So that's another reason why you wanna prune
your tomato leaves is that
the diseases tend to work their way up.
If I remove all the leaves that have powdery mildew,
there's less disease vector in general
to spread to the rest of my plant.
So there's multiple reasons to prune.
Just remember your climate context.
Are you getting late afternoon sun?
If you are, you're going to either need to not prune it,
or you're going to need to provide shade.
Those are the important things to remember.
The tomatoes will continuously grow,
and they will always produce more leaves,
so they're always going to be producing more energy
to produce more fruit.
It's not really that big of a concern.
If of course, you don't have any disease issues ever,
just let 'em go wild, that's totally fine,
but that's why in this context, my tomatoes look like this.
So I'm bringing you in a little closer here to show you
a little bit more about what's going on.
First of all, I wanted to point out that
tomatoes don't necessarily ripen in the order you expect.
So this cluster is older than the one below it,
yet this one's just starting to blush,
whereas this one is already fully turning red.
So those are a little bit of caveats
that things don't always go how you plan, but regardless,
let's take a closer look at the actual leaves of this plant.
So on this inner side of the bed is probably
where the least amount of sun is.
So I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna prune off this leaf here
just to show you what's going on.
This is powdery mildew.
All along the stem there's these little white splotches.
Those are the powdery mildew growing into the plant itself.
It starts taking over the leaves,
and really shutting down the photosynthesis,
so if it takes over your plant, it can destroy it.
Now, if I'm looking upwards,
and this is another important thing is when you're looking
at your tomato leaves, you don't wanna just look
at the top, because here's a great example.
If we were to look at the top of this leaf
in a quick sort of passing glance,
it might look pretty okay.
It doesn't seem to have that much disease,
but if you look at it from the backside,
you could see that there's way more powdery mildew
all along the stem.
So those are some important things to consider.
Don't just give a quick superficial look of your plant.
You wanna kind of look underneath it,
make sure there's no bugs, no pests, anything like that.
So those are kind of the basics
for pruning in this sort of context,
but now I want to show you a couple other scenarios
like these dwarf tomatoes in front of me, and talk
a little bit about diseased leaves and what to do with it.
So we're down here with these seven dwarves
which I did by accident, by the way,
but they are seven dwarf tomatoes, somebody asked,
and I wanna talk a little bit about diseased leaves.
So there's so many different tomato diseases first of all,
and a lot of them actually end up looking the same,
which could be very frustrating for identification.
But I will tell you that if you see the yellowing
of the leaves, and you start seeing these brown spots,
anytime you see a diseased leaf like this,
my personal preference is to take that and toss it out.
Once it starts getting disease, it's going to
start dying back and it's not going to be photosynthesizing
for the plant anyway,
so there's really no reason to keep it.
Now, the other thing that I'll mention is that
these are dwarf tomatoes.
So you'll see that they're only this tall,
and they already are setting a lot of fruit,
and actually back here, they are also beginning to ripen,
so this is the Adelaide Festival tomato.
You can see they're full size.
They ripen a lot lower on the plant,
and they produce fruit more frequently
because they just branch more frequently.
That's the nature of a dwarf tomato.
So you don't have to really worry about pruning
off the leaves as much, because they will produce more.
It's not really a big deal.
Now here's another example of a diseased leaf
that I would suggest removing.
Again, if it looks like this,
it's not doing anything for the plant.
It's not photosynthesizing.
It's already wilted back.
It's already dead, just take it off.
It's not helping your plant at all.
By removing it, you're giving the chance
of the plant to prevent that disease
and fight it from spreading through the rest of the plant.
So always remove disease and dead foliage.
There's no reason to keep it.
That's pretty much the basic rule for pruning,
besides things like airflow.
And with that, let's go take a look at some other examples
of tomatoes and how I like to manage them.
I actually wanted to mention one more thing
before we moved over to the Florida weave section,
and that is airflow.
The primary reason this kind of pruning works
in this scenario is that it's increasing
the airflow to the plant.
All of these diseases that we talk about,
things like powdery mildew thrive on poor airflow.
They want stagnant, kind of humid conditions, a little bit
of dry, a little bit of humid, but no wind, no airflow.
That's when these diseases really take root.
So in this case, this is like, I don't know,
three feet off from the ground, and that's all pruned out
because there's really nothing productive left,
but in the case like these dwarf tomatoes, either way,
I would say that regardless of your growing scenario,
you always wanna prune the leaves off a foot from the ground
because most of these diseases are soil-borne,
and most of 'em are going to thrive from poor airflow.
So if we could get at least airflow going at the base
of the plants, that's gonna do a lot to help them stay
healthy and look good.
That's the other reason why I always have mulch
on my beds, because these are soil-borne diseases.
By having the leaves close to the soil,
you're increasing the chance for that splash back effect
and getting that disease up into the plant.
So with that being said, we have a much more dense planting,
and that is the Florida weave over there,
so let's go take a look at how I prune those.
So we are now over here in the north garden.
So this section of my garden gets full sun pretty much
from the morning, all the way into the afternoon.
So that's why I have my Florida weave set up here,
because there's plenty of sun to go around.
I don't have to worry about too much disease issues.
Of course, I'm going to get disease.
Anytime you shove 15 tomato plants into a small area
like this, you're gonna have some disease,
but regardless, you could see that there is way more foliage
on these plants than the other ones.
So as I'm walking down, what you'll notice is that
it's a wall of leaves all the way throughout,
and that's because in the Florida weave,
every time they grow up, I come along with a string,
and I pull everything in together.
And what happens is that I'm getting tons of airflow
through here, because I get a nice strong coastal breeze
directly through this area,
I have full sunshine at all times,
and I have these oriented pretty much north-south
so that every single one of these three rows
of tomatoes gets sun at all times.
So that's why context is really critical
when you're thinking about how to set up,
prune, support your tomatoes.
Over in that garden, if I tried to do this,
there would be a powder mild disaster.
It would be a nightmare.
That's why over there I trained it to have
as little leaves as possible, so maybe two, maybe four,
whereas here, each plant could have, you know,
12, 20 different suckers growing at any given point,
and it doesn't really matter,
'cause they get full sun and plenty of airflow.
Now, the other thing you'll notice is that
my golden rule is always true.
At the base of all these tomato plants,
I do have everything pruned off.
So at least for the first foot or so,
there are no leaves really present,
and that's because I am trying to protect
against those soil-borne diseases.
Now a quick note, just to try to ease some panic is
that some tomato varieties just happen to have
a little bit of leaf curl to them.
So this one over here, I believe, was a Black Krim.
You'll see that some of the leaves have some curl to them.
That's totally fine, as long as it's not the entire plant,
or if it is the entire plant, and it looks kind of natural
and not like it's stunted and dying, that's totally fine.
So don't go ahead and cut off a plant like this just because
the leaves are curled is what I'm trying to say.
Now, let's come in a little bit closer
and do some detailed pruning talk, pruning work.
I wanna bring you in right up into the action
of where all these tomato plants are growing,
but first we're going to stop here
and admire my unnamed tomato, but my current largest tomato.
This is a variety called Delicious Hunt,
and it is a very delicious variety indeed,
but it also produces really large tomatoes.
So let's pan over here and we see
that there is a little bit of disease issue.
So I'm gonna come in with my pruners.
I'm going to remove anything that looks like this.
Anything that has this yellowing spottiness,
I want to get that outta here, and if you look up,
there is so much foliage that anything I remove down here is
effectively not gonna make any difference for the plant.
The other thing to remember is that the lower
down on the plant, the less sun it's actually gonna get,
because it is all getting blocked by the leaves above it,
so it's really not that big of a deal
when you remove these lower leaves,
because they really aren't doing that much for the plant.
So here's another one.
Again, anything that has sort of signs of disease,
you want to get rid of.
I actually forgot to mention, though, you can,
if you are worried, use a little rubbing alcohol.
A rubbing alcohol will remove most
of the diseases that we're familiar with,
but some of the more intense ones actually need bleach.
So I usually don't like using bleach,
because the bleach will wear out
your pruners really quickly,
and in general, I just don't like using bleach.
So I'm taking the risk and using something more mild
like alcohol, or in this case,
I'm actually using nothing at all.
I'm going a little bit risky today.
We're just gonna work our way down basically,
and remove all of these leaves, and as we get up high,
we're starting to see a little bit more disease pressure.
But the cool thing is that you could see right here
I already have some tomatoes ripening,
so things are progressing.
They're all going according to plan.
Now, any of the leaves that actually look diseased
like this, I will throw in the green bin.
I'm not going to compost them.
Things that have just powdery mildew,
I will occasionally compost,
because I don't really see there being any risk
of transferring powdery mildew, because if you have it,
you have it, it's in your environment.
Even if you start with a fresh container of brand new soil,
it's going to get powdery mildew at some point,
'cause it's just in your area.
There's just nothing you could do about it on that level.
So there's row number one,
that's the clippings that we picked out.
Now let's go into the second section where we have
Bulgarian varieties on the left,
and cherry tomatoes on the right.
So first of all, let's take a look
at some of the stems on these plants.
So these are varieties from Bulgaria that,
you know, have never grown here as far as I'm aware.
But the reason why I'm mentioning that is that
they're not used to the disease pressure
and the climate that we have,
so I'm seeing a lot more of this sort of stem mildew.
It hasn't seemingly ruined the plant yet.
It's overall pretty healthy.
I have the same amount of usual disease issues here.
I'm actually gonna remove this sucker,
'cause I see a little bit of powdery mildew,
but again, powdery mildew is just nature of the game.
We can't really do much about it.
Now, this kind of stuff, I always wanna remove,
any sort of wilting.
There are diseases like bacterial wilt that once it starts,
it can take over your plant
and actually overnight kill your entire plant.
So anytime I see sort of shrunken back fully wilted leaves
like this, I always make that a priority to remove.
You can sometimes save a plant by removing the foliage,
but many times once it's in there, it's in there.
And again, I'm not saying that
that's for sure what this is,
because tomato diseases can be hard to pinpoint
exactly what they are,
but the important thing to know is that they're bad,
and anything that's dead isn't doing
anything for you anyway.
Now, we're gonna come up and look at this right here,
'cause this is a perfect example
of what you would expect to find if you had a caterpillar.
So if you look, this is the original leaf stem,
and all along it, these leaves are entirely gone.
It even looks like it's been chewed on a little bit.
So this must have been a tomato hornworm
or something like that.
Actually over here, I see it as well.
I don't see, oops, even more over here.
So what we're noticing is that there's a lot
of these eaten up leaves,
and there could be a tomato hornworm hiding in here,
or what's also very likely is that a bird found it first
and ate it, 'cause I'm not seeing any droppings.
So usually the way you would identify a caterpillar is that
like for instance, if they ate this leaf,
or a better example would be they ate the leaf above it,
they would poop,
and the poop would land on the leaf below it.
You just track your way up until you find the caterpillar.
So in this case I don't see anything,
and I'm just going to assume that a bird got it.
Now, over here is an interesting example
of a hybrid tomato that is powdery mildew resistant.
So this is a Granadero plum tomato.
If you look at the stem, it seems to have
a lot less spottiness on it than any of the other plants.
Now, the leaves in general, I have yet to see
a significant quantity of powdery mildew.
I am seeing some of the more classic sort
of dying back foliage, but there's really no powdery mildew,
so I'm quite pleased with that.
I wanted to trial
at least one powdery mildew resistant variety,
might as well be a plum tomato that I'm going to process
into sauce, because if the flavor isn't perfect, it's okay.
So let's take a quick look at this plant over here.
This is the Brandywine cherry.
It is a cherry tomato that supposedly tastes
like a Brandywine beefsteak,
which is considered one of the best.
So what's happening here is that the plant has so much fruit
and it's extremely, extremely susceptible to powdery mildew.
This is one of the leaves off of it right here.
You could see it's literally frosted with mildew,
so I think this plant
in this growing environment just doesn't work.
So I'll probably end up taking this out,
but that'll be a decision for next week.
So to summarize some of the important tips
for pruning tomatoes, it's all about context.
When you're in your garden, think about your light,
your environment, whether you have a lot of coastal fog,
whether you have a lot of humidity.
All these different things are going to affect
how you wanna prune your plant.
For example, if you live somewhere in the South,
and you get intense sun exposure at all times,
you can't leave your tomatoes unprotected,
'cause they will get sun scald.
The things to worry about most is dead diseased foliage.
Always remove that.
Anything a foot off the ground, always remove that.
And beyond that, everything else is left up to context,
and remember, all of these tips will actually work
for your container plants as well.
Just think about where they're situated.
Are they getting full sun?
Are they overcrowded, getting a lot of disease issues?
Everything works for all the different scenarios.
So with all that being said,
those are the tomato tips for this video.
I wanted to teach you guys about the context
and how to think about pruning your tomatoes,
and not just tell you to do X, Y, and Z.
But if there was a specific thing you wanted to hear
more about, be sure to drop it in the comments,
and we'll do a follow up video.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys next time.
(upbeat music)