tomatoes: to prune or not to prune

[Stephen Younge]

I live in Boulder, CO, and my Early Girl Improved (planted in late May) is huge and dripping with green tomatoes. However, as August approaches, the plant seems to produce more and more green fruit, with no signs of any of them ripening. Should I begin to prune flowers or leaves off of the plant to focus its energies on ripening the fruit?

Cheers, Stephen

[Pat Kiewicz]

For plants that are loaded with green fruit, you can try root pruning. From an earlier posting in rge:

------------------- CORRECTION.... ....cut into the earth in a half circular pattern about

6 inches from the plant ( NOT 12 inches).

Supposedly, your tomatoes will ripen within one week.

[end of quoted materia]

That having been said, growing tomatoes on stakes (with regular pruning of side shoots) will give you ripe tomatoes earlier than growing them unpruned in cages. You get fewer tomatoes per plant this way. But you can plant more plants in less space and, for me, that means more variety. Early Girl Improved is well-suited to staking.