Two items on today's agenda.
Number one, check up on our ailing pepper plants, and number two talk about doing some
pruning!
I want to say that it's improving.
If you'll remember this plant and the one back there, I've been spraying both of these
with a foiliar spray fertilizer, to try and bring it back to life.
And I think it's actually working.
I have to go back and look at some old footage, but it looks like it's coming back to life.
These guys are still looking really good and healthy!
And if you look closely, in every plant, we are seeing fruit!
The other thing to point out, since putting these stakes in, I swear these plants have
grown another ten inches up and they're continually growing outward.
As a matter of fact, I'm going to have to tie back a couple of more limbs.
But on to what I want to cover in this episode, pruning your plants.
Now according to the extension office, this is an optional step that gardeners use to
help keep plants tidy, manipulate fruit growth, and even speed up rippening.
But they point out one other thing, and that is you should only prune indeterminate plants
beacuse they will continue to grow flowers and leaves throughout the growing season.
If you prune determinate varieties you may reduce the harvest at the end of the season.
Our cages have done a really good job of naturally keeping those limbs gathered and collected
and giving them a support system, so there's really no real reason to prune, according
to the extension office.
Either way you look at it, the key to pruning is pruning enough but not too much to where
the fruit is still getting the beneficial nutrients from the leaves and it's keeping
them shaded from the sun.
And this is also comes with little word of caution.
You should never prune tomato plants when your leaves are wet, as that might set it
up for a disease problem.
Now, let's bust out our pruners and do some pruning!
One of the things that we're looking for are leaves and limbs that are touching the ground
like this that are starting to yellow and blacken around the edges.
We want to clean this up and get rid of if because we don't want to spread this to the
healthier parts of the plant.
This will lesson the chance of disease and a nice pruned plant with fewer leaves, its
going to be less dense, allowing more air to flow throughout the rest of the plant.
And another added bonus of pruning off these leaves and thinning out the canopy, it's going
to make it easier to spot any kind of insect problems that we have that might other wise
be hidding underneath here.
So all we're going to do is trace limbs like this all the way back to the main stem, and
we're going to cut it off as close to the main stem as possible.
Here's everything that we pruned off.
We'll either put it in a bag and throw it away or just toss it in a trash can.
But here's what the garden looks like after everything has been pruned.
As you can see things are opened up, we have better air flow through the bottoms of the
plants, better sunlight, none of our limbs are touching the ground; looks good!
We wanted to prune off those limbs as close to the main stem as possible while trying
not to damage the main stem.
But look what I found after I opened this up.
Got a nice vine growing underneath here with some good tomatoes popping!
The other benefit to pruning, if done at the right time, it's going to re direct energy
to creating and rippening fruit instead of creating new leaves.
You might get fewer fruit on a pruned plant, but what fruit you will get, most likely will
be bigger had you not pruned in the first place.
And another additional benefit, because your training your limbs to grow up and your pruning
them off, you can put your plants closer together and grow more fruit.
This is also great for anyone that lives in a cooler climate where your in a race against
time to get your harvest before the frost comes in takes over, and kills anything that
you've got growing.
Another thing you can do when it comes to pruning, when you first go to plant, go ahead
and snip off those lower limbs or leaves to that you can get your plant deeper into your
garden to really get a nice strong root system.
Now if it's early to mid season and you're planting, the extension office recommends
that you continue to pinch off flowers until your plants have gotten to about 12 to 18
inches tall.
Again, so that we can redirect energy to healthy root growth.
And like we showed in the last video, you want to continue to pinch off suckers through
out the growing season to not waste energy in those areas.
Now as the growing season starts to draw to a close, our tomato plants are most likely
still going to be loaded with some fruit.
We'll touch more on this when we get closer to that stage in the game, but to help speed
up ripening late in the season, what we're going to do is go ahead and pinch off the
top of each main stem.
Our goal is to do this about four weeks before the first expected frost sets in.
This will stop flowering and any kind of new fruits from setting in and instead will re
direct all of that energy to your existing fruit to make them bigger and richer.
So what if you already have big plants growing in your garden like what we've got?
As we've already showed you, by pruning off those lower limbs and those leaves that are
touching the soil, we reduce the risk of soil born diseases setting into our plants.
As your plants get taller, it's recommended that you remove limbs and leaves up to 18
inches from the ground.
Again we want to work when our leaves are dry and not wet so that we reduce the amount
of water that can splash around and off leaves and onto another and spread disease that way.
Now for our particular, garden because our plants are supported by cages, we wanted to
remove those lower limbs again to promote good airflow.
Research provided by the extension office shows that leaves that are next to fruit clusters
are the ones that actually send sugar and nutrients to the fruit.
So when we're pruning and thinning out our plants, we want to make sure that we don't
remove leaves that are above or below a fruit cluster, so that we insure that those sugars
and those nutrients get to that fruit.
Leaving those leaves alone will also, help shade our rippening fruit so that we don't
get any kind of sun scalding going on.
So that's it for pruning!
If you have any other further questions, leave them in the comments section below, email
our customer service staff, or pick up the phone and give us a call.
For our next video, I think we're going to be touching on pest control.
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And as always, thanks for watching!