Decado
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Location: Crystal, MN (Zone 4)

Can Tomato Plants Get Too Big?

A friend was telling me yesterday that at around 4 feet tall I should clip off the guide branches. I asked him why and he said that if the plant gets too big there will be too many tomatoes for them to become ripened. Is this true or just an urban legend? I'm hoping this isn't true as my tomatoes have really hit their stride and are growing about 4 inches a day since I've put bigger stakes in.

The Helpful Gardener
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Location: Colchester, CT

Sort of true, but if you pull the plant just before frost and hang it upside down (my buddies grandpa in Maine used to do this every year because of his shorter season) the last fruits will ripen on the vine. I hang them in the garage (no cars in there and it keeps the frost off just enough...)

HG

Sybil_Vimes(4a)
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Location: Saint Paul, MN (Zone 4a)

At the moment, from personal experience I would say that it is true. My most prolific and most vigorous tomato plant is just shy of 4' tall and approaching 3' across, and it has a TON of tomatoes, mostly pea to paintball-pellet sized, with a few that range from golf to pool ball sized. None of them are ripe, all are growing slowly, and my very first tomatoes (which are FINALLY getting to be their end size) are STILL green, and have been for 4 weeks.

I am convinced that this is because there are too many tomatoes and too much new growth on the plants. I performed an experiment and got rid of as many new 'suckers' and new blossom groups as I could, to see if that would help the existing tomatoes, and sure enough, after I pruned, the existing tomatoes grew faster and the bigger ones turned a deeper green. I am *still* waiting for them to start turning red, but the response of the plant to being pruned indicates to me that the 'too many tomatoes' thing truly is the cause of why my tomatoes aren't growing or ripening.

I really hated to prune off the new blossoms, though, because I really wanted as many tomatoes as I could get! But if none of them ripen at all, then I won't get *any* tomatoes. Like the rest of life, it's a matter of ensuring that the current stuff gets encouraged to thrive.

I am going to go out today with some bone meal and a small amount of 10-10-10 fertilizer and see if adding a bit in the way of nutrients will also help the growth/ripening process along.

And if things don't start to turn red within the next 7-10 days, I may consider even more pruning . . . logically, if the plant only has so many resources to use, I want it to use them on the tomatoes, not growing new foliage, and my plant certainly would survive a bit of thinning.

We'll see what happens. But I don't think, based on personal experience, that the whole 'too many tomatoes' thing is a myth.

Next summer, I'm just going to buy more plants to get the amounts of tomatoes I need. This year, I only have two plants, but I have room for 6-8.


Sybil V.

Decado
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Joined: Fri May 15, 2009 10:52 pm
Location: Crystal, MN (Zone 4)

Well I've been pulling off all the sucker vines since I planted my tomatoes, I also have about a foot worth of vines cut off on the bottom to prevent blight. I'm also fertilizing them A LOT, I'm using a 10-20-10 slow release fertilizer and supplementing it weekly with Miracle Gro Bloom Booster Liqua-Feed. Does this mean I could possibly grow them bigger while still having the energy to ripen up all the tomatoes?

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gixxerific
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Location: Wentzville, MO (Just West oF St. Louis) Zone 5B

I always have lots of tomatoes even though I more than likely over water and over fertilize them every year.

RickNC
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Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:57 pm
Location: NC

I have grape tomatoes and they are taller than I am. So they are over 6'. The first fruits from halfway up the plant and down have almost all been picked already. The plant keeps getting taller and it seems there is less fruit growing on the upper part of the plants.

I did prune off all but the bottom sucker which I let grow. I may allow another to grow to get mroe fruit.

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stella1751
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Location: Wyoming

I am going to try to post a photo, Decado. I hope it works!

Back in 2007, I planted eleven tomato plants in a very small plot. There were yellow pears, early girls, huskies, beef steak, and one whose name I don't remember. Rutgers? This was my first garden at a new place with truly extraordinary soil. I wound up staking those tomatoes up to 8 feet high; you'll see the corner of my house behind the tomatoes if this link works. If I could have staked them any higher, they would have gone to ten or even twelve feet.

At any given time, I had at least a dozen ripe tomatoes and two or three dozen green ones on each plant. Well, there were considerably more on the yellow pears. For fun, I counted the ripe tomatoes I picked off the early girl. By the time the first killing frost came, I had picked 250 tomatoes off her. I was also mightily sick of indeterminate tomatoes, rare for me, and I planted determinates the next year :-)

[img]https://i801.photobucket.com/albums/yy292/mitbah/2007Garden001-1.jpg[/img]

I hope that photo worked.

Brandywinegirl
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Joined: Sun May 25, 2008 1:21 am
Location: East Coast

Holy cow - they look like pine trees! That soil must be amazing. My plants are over 4 feet and I have loads but because of all of the rain, they are all green. ONce they start to turn red, I will continue to pluck the suckers off & cut the tops off to promote wider growth.

Love this site - so informative. :)



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