Tomato maintenance

The tomato plants require some active maintenance and I wanted to share some tips after the work I did today. I'm not an expert, but I think these guidelines can be followed by us. At least that's all I can tell before we get a master class from Iñigo ;-)

One thing to note is that the branches of the tomato plant grow in pairs: one bottom and one top branch. Only the bottom branch is to be left, as it´s the one that has the leafs. The top branch, which in the beginning usually grows smaller, has to be taken out. See the next picture:

From the branches growing from the main stem, take out the top branch.

The sooner this is done the better. Our plants are full of these small branches and I took out several of them.

Same story here, do it when they are small.

If no control is done on the branches, some of them will become stems (the ones having the tomato flowers/fruits). And that's not good, since the plant just grows and grows, gets huge, but the tomatoes don't. Only one stem is to be left per plant.

The secondary stem is to be taken out too.

That's not a plant, it's almost a forest.

Most of the tomato plants contained three or more stems. I did a cleanup and left only one. Sometimes one has to decide which one will be the main stem. I think it's not really important which one to choose; I went for the best looking one :-P

In the following pictures you can see one of the Fleischtomaten (?) plants. You can try to spot the stems. When I took the pictures I thought it would be easier to see the configuration of the plant; I made it a bit easier in the next picture.

There are at least three stems, and growing from the ground there are several too, some of them not marked. It's definitely easier to see it on the spot. I removed all of the stems that I did not like and left a single one (picture is before removing all of the stems of the ground):

Only one stem. You can also see a handling problem... but I'm sure the stem will survive :-)

Some pics of other plants:

In this case, I chose to remove the left stem because it was broken.

I think we don't have to be afraid to remove branches and stems, otherwise we get big plants but no fruits. I hope that we'll be able to see some red tomatoes soon!

This is all I can tell, but I might be wrong in some points. If somebody else has tips on tomato maintenance, I would love to hear them!


Mikel