hi I'm John folks let's go someplace right here I have a plant it's a tomato plant Cherokee purple it's an heirloom but it's one I kind of saved out and decided not to prune so that I could show how to prune a tomato plant if you look at the tomato plant here you've got what looks like an entirely new plant coming off the side so you've got a new top and yeah there's buds and flowers and everything on it but it's gonna keep growing and growing and growing foliage if I don't tell it to do something otherwise so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to just take this branch and just pop it all the way off so I've got like an entire tomato plant I just popped it off so that it would force its growth into into producing fruit up higher here's another one here break that off a little one here and and any of these guys and the little limp it's show me right here and that would just come off and I prefer to do this without a knife I'd rather do it with my fingers that way it has it seems to have a better chance of eeling that way as we get up here I don't see any more little ones there and so it's got the top and got where it's going to be budding so that would be one way to prune indeterminate tomato plant indeterminate there's two different types of tomato plant you have the determinant plants and the indeterminate plants and the difference between the two is that an indeterminate plant will shoot up and it'll produce some flowers and some fruits and it'll shoot farther up and will produce some more flowers and some more fruits a determinant plant would be what most tomato farmers probably would use because they want a large crop all at the same time and what it will do is it'll shoot up and it'll branch out it'll bloom all at the same time produce fruit at all at the same time and pretty much have a large grouping of fruit all ripe at the same time which would be great in a canning situation if you're trying to can up a bunch of tomato sauce or stewed tomatoes or if you wanted to just have a large harvest of tomatoes all one time most home growers will probably have an indeterminate plant where it just keeps growing up and up and up and it it's a good idea especially in the northwest to pronate to where it's just a single stem that way you're getting less foliage and more fruit you know forcing it to fruit quicker in this case right here right here I'm going to take off these branches that when I transplant it these branches may actually hit the ground we don't want any of the branches hitting the dirt when we transplant it so I'm just going to take a couple of those branches off in fact I think I'm going to take them up up to here because being a tomato plant I can plant it all the way up to there if I want to I've decided to plant this particular plant a little higher up because I'm going to have my grapefruit tree in front of it and so it's going to have to just reach for the sky and do its best to get some light perfect root system all right now I'll have to send a piece of jute twine up to my the bamboo here and tie it up okay so here we are in the front garden with some more tomato plants that did I never prune and so I've got kind of a edge podge of tomato plants luckily they're in the hottest part of the yard and they are producing Tomatoes but they were in way earlier than any of the other Tomatoes I have I even have a ripening one down here at the bottom and I'm not sure even what kind of tomato plants these are these were all given to me from someone moving as all of them I have pretty much word so I'm saying that I've got some Tomatoes off of this piece of plant here and some off of this one here but you know I'm thinking I'd rather get a couple of them producing really well so first of all I'm going to tie it up I'm going to go ahead and strain this tomato plant up to where I can kind of look at what I've got and then I'll decide which branches I want to keep try to find the main stem which this is probably the main stem here it's laying down this is what a tomato plant does in the wild as it lays down and it sends up all these other ones and then they root and it keeps going like that because then it doesn't have to create Tomatoes it'll just keep replanting itself stick by stick and it'll have a whole bunch of little ones just by having foliage so I want it to produce tomatoes because that's why I've got it in the garden so I'm going to coax it into producing more Tomatoes than less foliage so first of all I need to make it grow up truck twine and okay so on this plant I've decided to keep two stems for certain the top of this one and the top of the original stem keep growing up and now I've got them to where hopefully they'll go straight up to the top of the strings but the rest these guys I'm going to I'm gonna keep from having them grow anymore so what I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to take the tops of these guys off that way it won't grow up anymore and I'll keep it pruned where it doesn't start any new shoots out the edges but the tomatoes that are starting I'll go ahead and let them grow I'm not worried about that I think they'll uh it's already put the time into it and into the foliage and stuff I'm going to let them let them grow and see what happens usually I would have cut this whole thing off weeks ago but I wanted to make a video of it it's taking a while okay this whole branch here popping the whole thing off looks like a lot of tomato plant so you get a little tomato on it huh that kills you to do that yeah I'm not going to keep it let's see this one here this one here I'm going to take off just above just here at the top because there's some tomatoes on I'll leave that one there and looking for any other signs of growth down towards the bottom where their little little shoots are growing out I don't want any more of those I want it to grow the tomatoes that are the main shoots there's only one thing better than a fresh salad in the spring or summer time that's a fresh salad with a brand-new ripe tomato see how this looks all right there we go so try to find a bucket to throw some dirt in and put a plant in it this time of year I would think probably cabbages or broccoli or something like that if you're starting from seed or if you can find a full-grown tomato plant you might even be able to get some Tomatoes still through the rest of the year hopefully you've already got up in the ground so girl someplace have a nice day hmm that makes it all worth