How To Super-Size Your Home-Grown Tomatoes
September 17th, 2009
Utah Stories publisher Rich Markosian shares his secret for producing giant, home-grown tomatoes
by Richard Markosian
Since learning proper pruning technique 2-years-ago, each of my tomato plants have nearly doubled their annual per pound harvest. Tomato plants naturally grow big and bushy, but if plants are grown with one central vine with "sucker vines" removed there are huge improvement in both size and fruit set.
How to Remove a Sucker
A "sucker" is an off-shoot from the central vine of a tomato plant that sucks nutrients and water, but produces very little fruit. Tomatoes that grow directly off the central vine will be larger and produce in greater fruit sets (typically 3-4) than the fruit from sucker shoots. The diagram on the right shows how to recognize and prune suckers. These sucker off-shoots grow after the stems and leaf nodes have developed. Prune these late coming shoots and you will see an amazing difference in size and number of tomatoes your plants produce and will have salsa all through September and October.
View a short video on how to super size your tomatoes
Reader Comments
Greg Owens
This was a excellent presentation. I'm going to try it on my Tomatoes. I also have raised beds and am getting black spots the size of a silver dollar on the bottoms of my Tomatoes and weird small holes in the sides of them. Almost like a bird has pecked a hole but there is not any other damage to the fruit. Any suggestions on my situation would be greatly received.
re: Greg Owens -- Greg, this is called "bottom rot" its is due to a lack of calcium in your soil, or an unbalanced PH in your soil. More information can be found here.
