I take a folded up piece of paper towel and wrap it around the base of the sucker (while it's on the plant) and hold it there with a tiny piece of tape - keep the paper towel damp - and after about a week - the sucker will have begun to sprout roots - then I cut him off and plant him :) :)
A sucker is the branch that grows out of the middle of the main stalk and main branch. And thanks for that very cool tip. I'm def trying that this year.
I heard that if you clip/remove them, you need to keep it up or the plant will become very spindly and will not be as fruitful as it could have been.
My theory - leave them alone. I have enough work in the garden, by the time the tomatoes a... growing, that trying to clip all suckers would ... a full time job.
Might try clipping sucker... one (1) plant and really keeping it up and seeing if it produced better, but I still think I d rather just plant more plants than work the ones in the ground... seems easier as long as you have space for lots of tomatoes.
I keep 'em as well! But if you end up in a situation where you have tons of green tomatoes and they aren't ripening, you might want to start cutting off some of that new growth to get the plant to switch its energy from growing to ripening.
From my understanding you can recognize which branch is the sucker because it grows out of the main stem at a 45 degree angle and its not a branch that the produces the fruit At least that is what I understood it to be Anyway As Im walking through my garden if I see a sucker that got heavy and is touching the ground I pinch it off If your plant looks good and is producing fruit I would leave it alone But if your plant has too many suckers turning yellow I would take them off I dont spend a lot of time on this but I dont hesitate to remove any sucker if it looks like the plant needs more air or its yellow We get some weird weather here in Texas and its not as easy to grow tomatoes here because it all the weather is severe We either have a monsoon or a drought or too hot or too windy Well I have managed to grow some tomatoes and for our climate I think taking the suckers off helps because it allows more air to move through the plant and also gets the plant to direct its energy into the fruit because we only have a limited time to grow a tomato once it gets up into the hundreds daily its much harder produce fruit Maybe if you have two tomato plants next to each other in the same environment take the suckers off one and not the other and see which one does better I think Ill try that myself It would be interesting to see the results.
supposedly you will get blossom drop when its under 50 degrees and no blossoms being formed when its over 100 So this leaves us a very small window of time to get the fruit going here in Texas
Thanks for that article joeythejoe. I was taught by my gardener friend that every sucker comes off... every one of them. And so, I've always watched them like a hawk! Sometimes a suckers slips by and I get so mad! But... after reading that article, and reading some of these posts, I'm going to take a different approach. Thanks for the feedback!
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