Your tomatoes are growing gangbusters in the sun and warmth – now is the time to prune them.

First, a quick primer on tomato types, which fall into two general categories:

1. DETERMINATE varieties will grow, flower, fruit, and die. Done, no more tomatoes, end of season, bye bye.
2. INDETERMINATE varieties will grow, flower, fruit, grow more, and keep going until something kills them. Death is usually the result of creature (human or critter), disease, ennui (did someone forget to water the tomatoes last week?!?), or environmental, such as frost.

Determinate varieties don’t really need pruning, but if you don’t prune your indeterminate types they can become an unruly mess that is difficult to work with and keep healthy. (Remember, tomatoes are vines, not trees!)

Left to their own devices, a few indeterminate varieties planted in a row will put out dozens of suckers. Each sucker requires energy. Each fruit requires energy. Keeping them all off the ground requires your energy (and trellising).

If you’re not pruning and you’re not trellising, you can end up with monstrous tomato plants sprawling all over the place, with lots of small fruit, more prone to disease (due both to nutrient issues and a lack of air flow), and making your time in the garden less pleasant, and somewhat less attractive.

To keep your life simple and the plants healthy, you want to remove suckers from the vines every few days. I typically recommend trying to keep tomato plants to no more than three vines per plant. That is, remove all suckers throughout the season except for three. Those three should all be several inches above the ground, to reduce disease issues and for simplicity.

Removing suckers is a simple process: Where a leaf comes off the main stem there is a “crotch.” In that crotch is often a new stem or “sucker” forming. Snap that sucker off and compost it. If it doesn’t snap off easily then by all means cut it off.

For me, this usually works very well until somewhere late July to early August when I ignore pruning for too long because life gets in the way. I’ll try to work my way through the tangled mess to remove suckers, and I’ll have some limited success. Such is life – the plants will continue producing fruit through September and usually into October, and at the end of the season I’ll have more of a jumbled mess to deal with. Oh well, I tried.

You can, and I hope will, do better.