Skip to main content

Pinch to grow an inch (-long tomato)

pinching 001So the side-door “Sweet 100” tomato (yes, I bought a non-heirloom commercial hybrid seedling, I know; shameful)  was getting entirely out of hand.  In fact, all the tomatoes were growing a bit wild, so I declared this a Weeding and Pinching Day.

Attacked a bunch of weeds around the back, on the neighbour’s property (because it adjoins ours and his weeds make my garden ugly and sick sometimes – the weed maples spread powdery mildew all over last year).

And then it was Pinching Time!

First, a word of caution:  Tomatoes can be either determinate or indeterminate.  Determinate tomatoes are the well-behaved kind:  they grow to a certain size, make their fruit, and eventually shrivel up and die.  NEVER PINCH DETERMINATE TOMATOES.  They only have so much “growing” in them – it doesn’t make sense to cut off any of it.

Indeterminate tomatoes are the vining flopping spreading type:  they’ll grow and grow and grow forever, if you let them, or until frost kills them. 

(what do they do in Israel or places where there’s no frost?)

Trouble is (and this is all from what I’ve read, though there is some controversy on this issue), they basically have enough energy to make tons of leaves or to make yummy, succulent fruit.  Dunno about you, but I’d rather have fruit.  To improve the quality of the fruit, as well as to improve the shape of the plant, you have to selectively control its growth.

The best way to do that is by doing what I think of privately in my head (and have never revealed to anyone before) as “shaving the armpits.”

See, indeterminate tomatoes are awful for producing SUCKERS where leaves branch out.  At the junction (“armpit”) of a leaf and the main stem, at a 45-degree angle, a small two-leaved sucker will start to grow (this one was on the hanging “Chocolate Stripes” tomato):

pinching 005

Left unchecked, the sucker quickly (within days!) can turn into an entire miniature tomato plant, like this one that I found today, hanging off old “Sweet 100”:

 pinching 003

See?  It’s even getting ready to flower!

  pinching 008

The hard part here is getting past the idea that if the sucker makes fruit, you will have MORE fruit.  That’s actually where part of the controversy comes in.  Some people say to just leave the suckers and you’ll have more fruit, and everybody will be happy.

But.  I don’t believe that.  I believe you’ll have a ton of puny, underripe fruit, unless you control the plant’s growth a little bit so it can put more energy into the fruit that’s already growing.

So you have to be harsh.  You have to snap off that sucker.  And you will actually find that it’s a pretty easy thing.

1)  Bend the sucker carefully away from the main stem.  The most important thing here is to not snap the main stem, but it should be sturdy enough by now.

 pinching 009

2)  Keep bending!  See, it’s starting to break!

 pinching 010

3)  Snap!  You’re done!  A clean break is best, without tearing a strip off the stem, which could invite bugs and disease.

 pinching 011

Look at that little plant there! 

pinching 012

You could probably stick this into the soil and it would grow into a whole new plant.  Tomatoes are pretty sturdy that way.  I just composted this one (okay, I just chucked it into a flower bed… ).

In the case of this side-door Sweet 100, there was also a ton of leafy growth that I was worried was too congested around the lower stems, which could lead to disease later on in the season when stress and drought set in (even with the Plant Nanny installed in the planter, which will probably help a bit).

Once a tomato plant is well-established, you probably won’t hurt it much by snapping off a few of the lower leaves.  I find these usually get bug-eaten and maybe a bit shrivelled anyway.  As long as there’s enough leafy green up on top to keep the whole unit going, you should be fine. 

Maybe even healthier, because as I said before, a plant with too little air circulation to the main stem – even if it’s because it’s covered in happy, healthy leaves – is a plant that is begging for attack by fungal and other diseases.

After taking care of “Sweet 100,” I also cleaned up the tomatoes in self-watering containers, because they, too,  were starting to sucker like crazy.  Hopefully, this plus some warm weather will help us see some yummy, red, ripe tomatoes someday soon!!!

By the way, wash your hands well after handling tomatoes.  I do snap them with bare hands because I’ve found that when I wear gloves, I can’t be as precise and that’s when I either hurt the main stem or tear off an “extra” strip along with the sucker (open wounds can also lead to disease).

Remember that those suckers are poisonous (literally).  Some people are more sensitive to tomato foliage and cannot handle them with bare hands.  If you are ever mysteriously itchy after coming in from the garden, it could be because you’ve been handling tomato foliage.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

It's Heart Month: 3 days left to save lives!

Dear Friends & Family: Hi, everybody! Sorry I can’t stop by in person... you're a bit out of my area.  :-) We’re out walking up and down on our street on this beautiful afternoon to raise money for Heart & Stroke.  This cause is important to me (I won't say it's close to my heart , because that would be tacky!).  I hope you'll join me by donating online. Growing up, I watched as every single one of my grandparents' lives were shortened by heart disease and strokes, and my father had a defibrillator that saved his life on more than one occasion.  Heart disease and stroke kill 1 in 3 Canadians and are the #1 killer of women. Please click this link to be redirected to my main page at the Heart & Stroke website: http://tinyurl.com/AtlasHeart Thus ends my personal appeal.  Official information follows.  :-))) ----- Heart disease and stroke is the #1 killer of women - taking more women's lives than all forms of cancer combined. But no one is immune. Th