I'm going to show you how to prune a tomato plant we're going to take off the suckers now how do you identify a sucker well first you look for a leaf and then above that at a 45-degree angle there may be a little feathery looking thing coming out that is a sucker and the more suckers you take off the larger your tomatoes that are left on the vine will get so I take off all but one sucker on most of my tomato plants except for Brandywine and cherry tomatoes those I only allow maybe 2 or 3 suckers and the reason I take off all these suckers is to help to give the plant more energy to put toward fruit production rather than green growth production because these suckers all they do is produce more and more leafy material and correspondingly less tomato actual production the most important thing is to take the suckers off but sometimes I take off the leaves if they look diseased or are turning blight into blight and what you have to remember though is to leave on the plant enough leaves to shade the tomatoes because tomatoes don't like to be out in full Sun they get a thing called Sun scald so it's okay to remove some leaves as long as you leave enough that the tomatoes are in shade the plant will produce clusters off of the main stem and the first fruiting cluster is usually at somewhere between a foot a foot and a half up on the main stem and then the the main stem will keep producing fruit and clusters off of it and the first sucker that you allow to stay on will get just as big and produce fruiting clusters off of it that each stem will provide a nice amount of tomatoes except for Brandywine and that's why you allow three or four suckers to stay on the plant they all get about the same size is the main leader until you don't know which one was the main leader anymore you