Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The aim of pruning tomatoes is to limit the number of fruit set per plant so that you get good quality fruit rather than lots of poor quality fruit. You also want to allow lots of air to circulate to prevent mould and other diseases.

This is how I do it:

As the plant grows it will produce lateral growth branches between each leaf stem and the main stem, if left unchecked each one of these will become its own growth stem and the plant will be loaded with heaps of leaves and flowers causing disease and poor quality fruit.

You should only allow the first of these laterals to grow so that you have two growth stems, the rest that continuously appear as the plant grows should be pinched off using you fingernails as soon as you see them.

Now that you are keeping the plant to two branched they will grow up and produce flower branches which are well separated and have good access to light. As the lowest of these flower branches sets fruit you should strip all foliage of the plant below the immature fruit so that the growing fruit is the first port of call for all the nutrient travelling up from the roots.

As you harvest all the fruit from the lowest truss you then strip all the foliage from the next highest truss with fruit and so on and so forth.