Monster Tomato Plant - Will it Grow Larger?

[dremmle]

I planted a beef steak tomato plant in a row along side my Romas. I did not do any trimming whatsoever to either plants. I wanted it to be big. The problem is it got too big! The beef steak plant is maybe 5 feet tall, and at least 5 feet in diameter. The plant is also very dense, I have to dig around to find tomatoes. I have previously only grown container tomatoes, so this is new to me. The plant grew larger than my row, and is now encroaching on various other vegetables.

Will the plant continue to grow?

Is it too late to do a little trimming, or should I just let it be and do my best to get around it?

Thanks,
Daniel

[GardenJester]

if you want your plant to stop growing, pinch the top. commonly people do this a month before end of the growing season to divert the plant's energy to fruiting rather than growing more greens.

[Duh_Vinci]

If you have room for it to grow - just let it do it's thing.

Regards,
D

[rainbowgardener]

If you do nothing, it will get to at least 7 feet tall, maybe more in your long growing season. If you are going to let it go, then you need to figure out a way to support all that.

When mine gets to be around 5 ft, I start pinching out the growing tips to encourage it to concentrate more on fruiting than getting bigger and bigger. I also pinch out all the suckers (new shoots that come up in the stem joints) on mine, so it is less wide and dense - I have 5 plants in a 4x8' raised bed, so I can't afford to let them get so huge.

[Greywolf]

I'd like to see a picture of that...

My own are just now getting to the point where they are growing faster and faster, biggest is about 18 - 24 inches tall right at this moment.

[TZ -OH6]

I once had a cherry tomato that was allowed to run rampant and it overgrew the wood pile and several big tomato plants around it. I cut about 30 feet of vines off of it to uncover the other plants, and then a couple of weeks later I had to cut more off of it. Any spindly vines that don't have fruit should be the first ones you remove if you decide to attack your monster.