To improve the yield and flavor of your tomatoes, grower should utilize a few key production practices about six weeks before they clear their plants. CropKing’s Theodore Huggins outlines these secrets of end-of-season success.
Topping and pruning
“Six weeks before our plant pull, we will [need to] take off the top of the plant,” Huggins says. “What we’re going to do is take off any flowers that haven’t set fruit yet – and we’re going to top the plant at essentially the growing point, [called] the apical meristem.” This is the “sucker” or stem that’s above the top cluster of tomatoes.
Topping the plant allows it to push all of its energy into finalizing the cluster that’s on it, which will typically consist of five or six fruits, he adds. When doing so, you’ll want to spare one leaf below each cluster, which will not only provide proper shading to the clusters that will develop underneath, but will also transfer sugars to the fruit, improving its flavor.
Huggins notes that at the top of the plant, you’ll also want to leave two to three leaves to act as shading for the rest of the plant in the meantime. Then you can prune all other unnecessary leaves. Once you do your initial pruning after topping, you can prune the remaining leaves up the plant as you harvest your tomatoes each week over the next six weeks.
Reduce water and fertilizer inputs
Because you’ll be removing so much of the plant parts, it’s imperative to cut your watering in half during the last six weeks so as not to be wasteful, Huggins says, adding that the water that will be used will be simply maintaining the structure of the plant, as well as increasing the fruit size.
Additionally, you may continue with the same fertilizer solution, but you’ll also want to reduce it significantly. “We don’t want to run it too high that we end up restricting the total amount of water the plant can uptake and risk blossom end rot,” Huggins says. “But we don’t want to run it too low because we still need to get a lot of those ions into the fruit itself.”
Swing down the temperature
To increase the swelling, sizing and tasting of the fruit, decrease the greenhouse temperature about 10 degrees Fahrenheit at sundown for three to four hours per evening. Then, gradually bring the temperature up throughout the night until morning.
“When we get temps to go down really low, the fruits end up getting colder slower than the rest of the plant, so it sends more sugars to the fruit itself,” Huggins says.
Photo: iStock.com
