Learning about plants - Proper Pruning Produces Plentiful Produce

I don't know if it's the engineer in me, but I typically try to find the most efficient way to do something.  I'm always trying to figure out a better way to do something, particularly in the garden.

Since I started gardening, I've made a lot of mistakes -- particularly in the first few years.  Here are some things I've learned regarding pruning of my vegetables.

Trimming Suckers

Suckers are little growths that sprout from the crotch between the primary trunk and a primary branch/offshoot.  When allowed to persist, they end up creating volume in your plant and give extra medium with which to grow the fruit from the plant.  I see them particularly in tomatoes and pepper plants (which are related).

Because suckers help you grow fruit, they are a very good and necessary part of crop production, however, they can also be problematic.  From what I've read -- and my experience corroborates what I've read -- as suckers develop and are allow to persist, the plant psychology (if that's even a thing) seems to be given the message that it's fruit-making time.  If you want short plants, you can allow the suckers to develop as happens naturally.  If not, then you need to pinch off the suckers to keep the plant in "growth mode" rather than "fruit-making mode."

I generally prefer to have taller tomato and pepper plants.  By doing so, you have taller trunks which will eventually lead to more overall plant volume to bear even more fruit. 

Pinching the suckers off is typically an easy process.  When the suckers are young, you actually pinch them with your fingers.  The only care you need to have is to ensure you don't accidentally pinch off the primary shoot.  In my enthusiasm, I accidentally did that when I was first learning about sucker-pinching.  I ended up with a beautifully-developed tomato plant that wouldn't produce flowers (and, thus, no tomatoes).

Remove the low-level offshoots

From one point of view, it's nice to have bushy plants.  Particularly when you're very new to gardening, any growth is good growth.  It's definitely a triumph over your noobery.  

Unfortunately, low-level growth is generally a bad thing.  There are a couple of reasons why you want to remove vegetation that's close to the ground.

1. Low-level vegetation traps moisture.

Yes, plants need water to grow, however, by trapping moisture close to the ground you inevitably develop fungus problems.  Once you do that, it's a constant and often losing battle for the plant's survival.  Also, you're robbing energy from the plant that could be better put into growing tasty produce.  It's also annoying for you to deal with and is very discouraging if you're still quite noobish in your gardening.

This is the single biggest reason to remove low-level vegetation.

2. Low-level vegetation helps encourage pest travel.

Thanks to a heavy application of companion planting, I don't typically have a whole lot of pest problems with my tomato and pepper plants.  That being said, you don't want to help out any pests (especially insects) to get to your produce.  Low-level vegetation usually ends up touching the ground and will give critters another avenue to get farther up your plant stalks.

 3. Low-level vegetation can help introduce disease to the plant.

Soil and other nearby plants can have any variety of diseases and fungus.  Leaving low-level offshoots to exist can have them droop after rain or planned watering which will only help to bring problems to your plants.

When pruning off the low-level stuff, I typically prune all horizontal vegetation from the bottom 12" - 18" of my plants.  That gives a respectable pathway for evaporation of ground-level moisture and encourage airflow.  I don't do all this pruning all at once, but do it gradually as the plants grow upward.

Clear out other vegetation

The concept of removing low-level vegetation from your plants also extends to that of other plants around the base of your crop-plants.  Below, you can see where I've pruned off horizontal shoots from my tomato plants.  Nearby, there are volunteer tomato plants as well as some volunteer cosmos plants starting. 

If those volunteers (or weeds in other cases) are allowed to develop, they will end up crowding the crop plants.  That will cause moisture to be trapped around the leaves (encouraging fungus problems) as well as forcing the crop plants to put more energy into competing for light rather than growing in a planned method.

Pinching off flowers

As with suckers, there are times when you want to pinch off flowers.  On crop plants, the flowers become the fruit.  If your crop plants are allowed to continue growing flowers, the plant "psychology" will be to fully transition into "fruit-growing mode." 

As you see the flowers start to form, you need to persistently pinch them off in order to encourage the plants to put energy into growing the plant, not developing fruit. 

Once you're generally happy with the size -- both height and girth of the plant structure -- let the plant continue with flower generation.