By simply cutting off extra suckers and lower leaves you can give your tomatoes the best chance at fighting of disease, mildew, and pests.

But not all tomatoes need pruning!

Here I go into which tomato plants need pruning and how to make the cuts.

So let’s dive in…

Pruning Tomato Plants | What Tomato Plants need Pruning?

It may be a surprise, but tomatoes naturally have a sprawling growth habit similar to how pumpkins grow.

The idea of staking tomatoes has become so common practice that many people forget that tomatoes actually have this sprawling behavior.

However, staking and trellising your tomatoes comes with many benefits.

Turns out the tomatoes that grow on the ground not only takes up a ton of precious garden space but unfortunately can be very prone to diseases and bugs.

Sure some varieties today are bred to be disease resistant (a bonus) but for the most part if your tomatoes touch the ground you can rest assure a bug will find it first or disease will set in.

So in comes the staking. And the need for pruning.

A practice that can not only save you space in the garden but save yourself on fighting off pest and diseases and make harvesting easy.

Types of tomato plants

There are two types of categories of tomatoes plants and only one needs pruning.

Indeterminate
Determinate

Indeterminate tomatoes will have an unknown height, as in it will not stop growing. Indeterminate varieties will grow and grow until the frost nicks them. These are the tomatoes that need pruning.

Determinate varieties are opposite; they will have a determined height that we can often predict (usually just a few feet tall). Once that height is reached, it will stop growing and ride out the rest of the season.

Your seed packet should always tell you if they are indeterminate or determinate.

Once you find out what you are dealing with then the decision will be made for you on if you need to prune.

Indeterminate needs pruning while determinate do not need pruning.

Pruning is especially practiced with indeterminate plants because of the insane amount of growth they can put on.

It’s not uncommon for an indeterminate tomatoes plant to reach 10 feet in height or more.

To counterbalance this growth and to actually have a plant full of tomatoes and not leaves you want to prune.

Pruning Tomato Plants | Where to Cut

Pruning Tomatoes:

Always cut, never tear
Always start at the bottom
Cut away suckers and extra leaves
Leave flowering stems alone

Always cut, don’t pull

Use a nice sharp pair of scissors to cut away extra leaves and suckers to leave a clean cut.

Try to avoid pulling off extras because you will likely pull some of the main stem with it an create damage on the stem.

A simple kitchen scissor will work on tomatoes.

Always start at the bottom

You should always start at the bottom of the plant and work up.

If you go top to bottom you will more than likely cut the wrong stem or do what’s called “topping off”.

Topping off is actually common practice for indeterminate plants late in the season and where you cut the tops off the plants to make them stop growing.

This is no good if you do it early in the season.

By starting from the bottom and going up it become will be easier to see what you are cutting off and avoid the accidental topping off.

Cutting Suckers and Extra Leaves

Suckers are actually extra stems that will eventually produce fruit.

While some choose to leave one or two extra suckers to grow and produce, allowing them all to grow will quickly override the plant and create too much weight to stake up. Hence the name ‘sucker’.

You can tell they are suckers because they always stem out of the middle of two other branches: usually between the main steam and a leave stem.

It is best to cut most if not all suckers off.

*Sucker shown here; notice how it comes out the middle of the main stem and a leaf stem*

Extra Leaves are easy to spot as they only have leaves on them. Leaf stems will not hold any flowering stems but are there for photosynthesis.

The problem is when leaves overcrowd diseases set in. So it is best to cut off all extra leaves starting from the bottom up, leaving only the top canopy of leaves.

Your plant should look like a tree. Bare at the bottom with leaves at the top.

I also always cut away all leaves that touch or surround fruit.

This not only allows the cluster of tomatoes to breath and have room to grow but this also makes harvesting much easier since they are free of leaf overgrowth.