Tomato Suckers

One of the best ways to improve your yield and fruit quality on your tomato plants is to trim the suckers.

Aptly named "suckers" do just as they sound; they suck the nutrients out of a plant to create a stem that isn't very productive at all, only taking energy away from other stems of the plant. It's generally against your interest to let them run amuck.

Suckers develop in the armpit of leaves and the stem. If left alone, they will make an unmanageable, tangled mess out of your garden.

Pinch them off when they are still small to keep your tomato plant on the right path.

Important note: only do this for indeterminate tomatoes. Since determinate tomatoes grow more slowly and they stop at a certain point, suckers are simply part of their life cycle. Trimming them may stunt a determinate plant and prevent them from developing as many blossoms. On the other hand, indeterminate suckers sometimes never produce a flower cluster at all, and these vines only take away from developing tomatoes.