today we're going to talk about tomato plants and why you might not be having the success you want in them oftentimes it's not hard to get a nice green healthy plant with lots of leaves but you're not having success with any blooms and no fruit is setting or no food is ripening so let's talk a little bit about the reasons for that if you have a tomato plant similar to this plant where you've got a lot of nice big green growth but no blossoms that's because the energy in the soil is all growth energy which which means the form of nitrogen in your soil is creating lots of green leaves and plant and the phosphorus that may be in there isn't being accessed by the plant in order for the plant to start blooming it needs to have more phosphorus or more or the nitrogen has to be in more of a reproductive type or form and so my suggestion to you is to go get a some kind of phosphorus supplement you can use bone meal phosphoric acid you can use chemical fertilizers a good one would be 11 52 0 so that middle number that phosphorus number is really high and that will change your soils so that it will become more of a reproductive energy in the soils you can also put down some ammonium sulfate which will also it is a nitrogen but it is a nitrogen that is more of a reproductive energy reproductive energy will then begin to give you the blossoms and the fruit set that you need to be able to have any uh tomatoes before the season's over another thing that often happens is the plant is is just too big and bushy and so uh it doesn't get the light into the center like it needs to so it can't ripen the fruit and so there are a couple of things you can do once your fruit does set and it's not ripening like let's say these these right here is you can what they call stress the plant by breaking it down actually breaking a lot of the branches down and it kind of sends a signal to the plant that oh my gosh i'm going to die here so i got to ripen all my fruit and it will start to ripen those fruit another thing that we like to do is take off all the suckers and get rid of any leaves that aren't absolutely necessary some leaves are necessary but oftentimes the tomato plant has too many leaves and it can't get the light and the air circulation in there and it is not helpful for trying to ripen those tomatoes which are underneath all this leaf cover so i want to show you here what a sucker is and how to take it off and how to trim your leaves out of your tomato plants first of all i'm going to go and we're going to take a look at some tomato plants that are in the hoop house that we keep well trimmed and they are ripening really well for us and then we'll come back out here and show you show you some suckers and how to thin this out so that it is more manageable and so that the fruit is also larger when you have tons and tons of suckers and lots of growth your fruit is really really small and so that's really not what we're after so we take a lot of this extra growth out keep the suckers down and maintain a main stem where your fruit actually grows off of and then we have a lot larger fruit so let's go ahead and go inside the hoop house and take a look at the tomatoes in there these are our hoop house tomatoes and we keep these trained up so that we can actually put more in here at one time it just can serve space to grow up instead of to grow out so what i wanted to show you was how many of the leaves we actually do take off our bottom the bottom area of our tomatoes is almost completely leafless and we just have the tomatoes there we do keep some leaves on up here at the top but not too many and we still come in and take the suckers off and i want to show you a sucker here's your main stem right here here's a leaf and then this thing that grows right out from the middle of the main stem and the leaf is the sucker and we just go ahead and take that right off it will it will grow a fruiting branch but it makes it too big bushy and out of control and then here's another one right here to come up the stem you can see that here's a leaf here's the main stem attached right there and i'm just going to snip that right off you can see right here is we have our branching branches where there are fruit and we just leave those on but i will go ahead i will go ahead and take off some of these leaves because not all of them are necessary and we don't want the growth going to leave we want it going to fruit so i will come through and trim out a lot of these suckers this one got away from us and it's way big but i'll just go ahead and snip it out and we maintain this central leader here you can see that we have it setting nice fruit these are heirloom tomatoes and so they have that funny shape okay if you want to move on down we have another type of tomato here it is a little sweet 100s and you can see how nicely the fruit set on this and when i take off a lot of these leaves that are unnecessary more of the energy growth goes to the fruit so again here is our main stock right here here's our main stock right here and this is a sucker so i just come in i snip that off and then i'll go ahead and attach this up here you can see we have a sucker here and a sucker here as well okay and then i can attach the main stem to our little clips that hold them in place okay yeah i could use one okay here we go put that right on there and that keeps that groin and and so then when we get it up to the top here our bottom way down here all the way down here has already started ripening and we harvest the bottom and then we just drop the string down so the the stems right here down on the back bottom kind of drag along the ground and we continue to grow up by just dropping this wheel right here keeping keeping everything going here's an example of some newly pruned tomato plants and you can see that they are strung up and a lot of the leaves have been cut off you can also see a really nice sucker growing in there so we'll just take that off as we look down we have strung these up clipped away a lot of the extra growth so we can get the um light in there and the fruit set can be a lot larger this is where we ended right here you can see this side here is just massively overgrown so we're going to show you here how we're going to trim that back and clean that up so here we have this branch coming out here and this is obviously a sucker too that got away from us and i have a choice here of pulling it up and attaching it in and creating main sock out of it or just cutting it right off and so i'm going to kind of check to see how much room we have and i think that we have plenty of other things that we can use for main stock so i'm just going to go back and cut it off right next to well let me get rid of some of these leaves so you can see what's going on here i'm going to go back and cut it right next to where it's fruiting right there and it's going to get rid of it just get it out of the way okay this one right here is also a sucker does have some fruit on it so i'll go ahead and do the same for that and uh just kind of clean some of the leaves out of here okay so then i'm going to take this one back here you can see and there's a sucker on that and pull that off and i'm going to attach it right here to this string or this rope or you could be on a tomato cage or whatever or steak and uh stake that up right there so it can grow up and i'm going to reach back here and clip the sucker off of it even though it has fruit on it it's just too much too much for the plant and for the gardener and it's not necessary so i'm just take all these suckers off those are all suckers i'm just gonna take those off and we're just gonna keep this main stem going here okay so you take a go out and take a look at your tomato plants you can start making decisions about what you want to keep in there and what you want to get rid of and i guarantee you you're not going to make any mistakes that are that damaging to your plant but you do want to free it from a lot of this extra growth and and let some light in some air going