Here’s how to prune your tomatoes for MAXIMUM production. Leave those suckers #garden #tomato #prune

I'm going to put my hand right here and show you what a tomato sucker looks like. So you've got this main tomato stem here. This is the main stem of the plant. This is a non-fruiting leafy stem, and then right here at the 45-degree angle, this is a sucker. Most gardeners, they're going to tell you to pinch that sucker, get that sucker right off that plant, but not me. I keep the suckers, and here's why. So every single sucker that forms on your tomato plant, it is actually going to grow into a fruiting vine. What I do instead is prune this stem because this is the non-fruiting stem, and I just want more fruit. Now the people who say to prune the suckers, they want bigger fruit, but me, I want more fruit because more is more. So once a weekend, I come in with my pruners. I'm going to start at the base of the plant, and I am looking for the non-fruiting stems. Now down here low, I am going to cut those suckers because that's just too much growth there at the base. So I'm going to cut the suckers all the way until I get about 1 foot up on the plant. Then once I'm a foot up, I'm going to leave the sucker, but I'm going to cut the horizontal stem, the 90-degree stem, and leave that sucker. Cutting these leaves off is going to focus the growth of the plant on flowering and fruiting instead of making a ton of leaves. Then every single sucker is going to give me more tomatoes.