I'm gonna pinch you sucka'

Allusions to bygone blaxploitation films of yesteryear aside, what this post really hopes to address is the removal of "suckers" from indeterminate tomato plants. This idea was presented to me by a close friend's father, Joe, who is also growing tomatoes, among many other vegetables. While I was admiring his garden a couple of weeks back, he asked me what I knew about pruning tomato plants so that they might produce better fruit and direct more of their collected energy toward fruiting rather than leaf production. I promised to do some research, and here are the conclusions at which I've arrived:

Pruning tomatoes is intended to direct most of the plants gathered nutrients toward producing fruit. This is best done once the plant is well established, after it has grown four or five fruit bearing branches. All additional shoots can then be pinched off. The shoot to be pinched off in this picture rests between the main stem and the branch.

The branch already contains blossoms which will soon develop into fruit. By pinching off the shoot, theoretically, more nutrients will be directed toward that fruit rather than being wasted on the shoot. I found the easiest way to remove unwanted shoots was by pinching them. Firmly grasp the shoot between the forefinger and thumb and wiggle it back and forth until it snaps off.

Pinching the shoot rather than cutting it also helps to prevent the open wound from being infected.

I'll be conducting a little experiment to determine, in my own opinion, whether or not pinching the shoots makes all that much difference in the amount/quality of fruit harvested. Some plants will be left to grow as they would in the wild, free from pinching fingers, and I'll compare results at the end of the season. My intuition is that it won't make a demonstrable difference, but that's probably just the skeptic in me speaking. We shall see...