A sharp-eyed reader scolded me for failing to mention (in a recent column) the importance of pruning to encourage a tomato plant to focus on making tomatoes, not leaves and flowers that will never fruit.
My focus was on how to water tomatoes (hardly an urgent issue this summer). But my critic’s point is well-taken.
How to prune Solanum lycopersicum depends on whether it’s determinate (bush-type), producing its fruits all at once, or indeterminate (vine-type), fruiting indefinitely as the vine grows ever taller.
In our climate, with its relatively short window of growing opportunity, many gardeners prefer the all-at-once shrubs, on the theory that their plants will give them a bumper crop before winter sets in. Leftover tomatoes can always be canned for winter enjoyment.
Vining tomatoes reward those willing to bet on an endless fall. The bigger the tomato, the longer its maturity time. Some big fat heirlooms and beefsteak varieties take 80 days or more to fully ripen.
To get a head start, some aficionados begin their vines under lights and hold off planting outdoors until June.
If you plan ahead in this way, your plants will keep the tomatoes coming from August until October, weather permitting.
In other words, indeterminate BLTs.
(Smaller tomatoes such as the cherry and grape varieties are ideally suited to the vining style because they take half as long as the big boys to mature.)
I grow tomatoes whose labels promise that if all goes well, I’ll be dining on mozzarella and tomatoes garnished with shredded fresh basil and drenched in olive oil in a mere 70 days from start to finish.
Of course, I cheat. My plants come from the garden center, not my basement incubator. And I buy them big, that is, on the verge of (or already) flowering.
Then I plant them deep, so that only the topmost leaves are above ground. This method makes for more robust plants and the kind of abundant leaf growth that feeds the roots that feed the fruits.
Pruning encourages the plant to build tomatoes instead of surplus leaves and flowers with no chance of bearing ripened fruit before the snow flies.
No sense spending precious energy on a lost cause. Off with their heads!
My apologies to those who swear by their practice of harvesting green tomatoes and letting them ripen indoors in the fall. I’ve never found the results worth the effort, fried-green-tomato recipes notwithstanding. For me, there’s no substitute for a fully ripened, fresh-off-the-vine (or bush) tomato.
Which is why I am determined not to let any more varmints (such as my chickens) get to my tomatoes before I do.
Having coughed up the first of this year’s harvest, each of the tomato rings that support my vining plants is now imprisoned head to toe in stainless steel wire mesh.
Suck it up and saw it off
Even if I didn’t grow tomatoes, pruning would be my main task at this time of year. I have learned to suck it up and saw it off — yes, even the languid limbs of the pagoda dogwoods that, as I mentioned last time, self-seed vigorously in my garden.
My practice is to remove the current season’s growth on both dogwoods and viburnums (cranberry bushes). This encourages the plants to fruit heavily instead of growing new leaves and stems.
I like to think the wrens and chickadees are thanking me as they feast on the pretty blue and red berries that are, I admit, way too bitter for my taste.
The crabapple trees get the same treatment, though I’m trying to persuade mine to develop a more “natural” shape. They are in recovery from my having forced them for years to resemble gigantic lollipops.
Andre le Notre I am not. (He designed Louis XIV’s gardens at Versailles.)
I can’t say enough about a pruning tool that enables me to do all this myself, even though my trees are now four times my height.
The Finether long-handled pruner is probably made by a Chinese company. Though the website artfully obscures this fact, the price is a dead giveaway. I bought it at Home Depot for less than a third of what I’d expected to pay. It is adjustable to three different lengths, the thinnest and most distant from the user being, of course, the lightest.
In this way it reminds me of a fishing rod that tapers to a narrow tip capable of bending under the weight of its thrashing prey without snapping.
The pruner doesn’t bend, but it is surprisingly maneuverable. The sharp (bypass) jaws hold and snip stems and branches with authority. The plastic handle not only squeezes them shut but also enables them to swivel, a vast improvement over long-handled pruners whose jaws are operated by ropes.
It comes with a pruning saw for thicker branches.
My hots for hydrangeas
I had intended to write about hydrangeas this week. Oh, well … to summarize, I am continually amazed at how they salvage the otherwise (despite all my pruning and weeding) sad situation in my garden as it struggles through the summer doldrums.
For novices, “summer doldrums” refers to the hot (and usually dry) period in July and August between early bloomers and the glories of fall.
What a blessing are the sprightly panicles of the peegee hydrangeas (H. paniculata). My old-fashioned “Annabelle” (H. arborescens) seems to sense the competition, or maybe it’s all that rain, but instead of toppling over per usual, she is standing tall beside (supported by?) newcomers like H. paniculata “Quickfire,” “Pinky Winky” and “Pink Diamond.”
“Incrediball” was bred to correct “Annabelle’s” terrible posture. I find its blooms (like its name) a bit too robust for my taste, but the stronger stems do prevent drooping under all that weight.
My romance with the “forever” blooming bigleaf hydrangea (H. macrophylla) that flowers on both old and new wood is over. “Let’s Dance Starlight,” a charming lacecap with purplish-pink flowers, remains a love interest, but these hydrangeas just aren’t meant for our climate.
The bloom time is off, with the flowers on last season’s stems too often getting nipped by an early spring freeze and the flowers on new wood coming too late.
Also, the plants seem to struggle with our slightly warmer but still endless and increasingly erratic winters.
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July 31, 2020 at 07:01PM
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Bonnie Blodgett: Focus on the fruit, tomato plant! - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
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