Is Pruning Your Tomato Suckers Worth It? Here's What To Know

If you've savored a garden tomato that's warm from the sun, pause to recall its taste and texture. Your teeth pop through the skin, and the fruit bursts in your mouth, sweet and sour at the same time, still smelling slightly like the acrid leaves of the plant. Once you have one home-grown tomato, you want more, more, more!

Avid tomato gardeners are constantly trying for a bumper crop, and removing suckers has become nearly common knowledge when it comes to boosting production. Many home gardeners, even those who are certified master gardeners, don't make this a high-priority task. Others ignore it completely. So, what do we tomato lovers really need to know about these little plant growths? Will nipping them off really help you grow the best tomatoes in your garden?

Like so many other things in life, the truth is more complicated than "no suckers equals better yield." University extensions tend to stick with the "prune suckers" argument, and we tend to put more credence in people with credentials. However, there's a lot to be said for the wisdom that comes from hours spent in the dirt. In short, it's hard to say whether pinching off suckers is worth the time, and there may be enough anecdotal evidence — backed by one university study — to convince you to eliminate this tedious chore from your gardening to-do list. Yet, another university experiment came to the opposite conclusion. Your own decision to prune suckers or not may boil down to a combination of your growing conditions, the types of tomatoes you've chosen, and how packed your summer schedule is.

Saving time might be the most convincing excuse for leaving tomato suckers as-is, since many home gardeners don't see much benefit from doing it. But, there appears to be a disconnect between what experienced gardeners and academics say.

One exception is a Rutgers University study that delved into the question; researchers saw that removing suckers on heirloom tomato plants early in the season had no effect on yield. Also, mid-season harvests were higher on plants that had only two suckers removed or none at all were significantly more productive. Typically, it takes more than one study to come to a definitive conclusion on a scientific theory. Still, if you take into account scores of home gardeners' opinions, the findings might be enough to tip the scales toward leaving the suckers be.

Some experienced home growers claim that the prune or no-prune conundrum is a matter of whether you want bigger tomatoes or just more of them. Pruning suckers supposedly leads to larger fruits, while leaving them intact encourages a bigger harvest. However, that recommendation doesn't come up in professional or academic sources. Determining the right variant for your own garden might have a bigger influence on fruit quality and quantity.

Diverting a plant's energy toward the kind of growth we want is common practice, from deadheading flowers to pruning tree branches. It follows that snipping away tomato plant foliage could preserve energy to put toward fruiting. That factor may be what has university extensions continuing to advise pruning suckers.

Tomato suckers don't usually bear fruit, so removing them can save the plant valuable energy while also aiding with air circulation. Since tomatoes can be victims of leaf diseases, improving circulation can help prevent them. If your own tomato plants often are afflicted, this reason alone might convince you to prune suckers.

A study at Bangladesh's Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University found that their tomato plants had the highest yields when both suckers and old foliage were removed compared to no pruning, removing just suckers, and trimming off old leaves. If you do lean toward the age-old practice of sucker removal, be aware of these mistakes to avoid when pruning plants that can prevent unwanted negative consequences.