Growing Tips Limit plant growth. For higher yield, limit growth to 2 or 3 stems. Also, to avoid attracting bugs and slugs, make sure your main leaf-stems are all at least one foot from the ground. In pruning your plant, your objective is to expose each leaf to sunlight and direct the plant’s energy into making tomatoes. However, you must leave enough leaves to cover your growing fruit. Tomatoes don’t need direct sunlight to ripen, but without some protection from the leaves, they will burn. To minimize disease, you want the air to move freely through the leaves. Remove enough leaves so that the area around the base of the plant is not crowded.

Remove side-shoots (suckers) when they are 3 to 4 inches long by breaking them off or by cutting them with clippers.

When tomatoes appear, suckers also appear between the main stem and the tomato-bearing leaf stem. These suckers rob your tomatoes of nutrients and result in inferior tomatoes. They also produce lots of useless leaves, blocking the sun from the tomato-bearing stems. Left alone, suckers produce more suckers and your plant will become a tangled, unproductive mass. Some growing guides even claim that pruned plants produce fruit earlier, too.

Support your plants (with the Spiral Stand, of course). After planting your tomatoes (or other climbing plants), anchor the assembled Spiral Stand so that the plant is centered inside the spiral. Left unsupported, your plants will sprawl on the ground, the leaves will not get the sunlight they need and the plants will be in danger of becoming diseased. As your plant grows, gently coax branches into the spiral. That’s all there is to it! As your plant grows, gently coax the branch back inside the coil.