Pruning tomatoes?

This year I had to prune my tomatoes! And I’m not talking about nipping out a few laterals to keep them under control, but full scale pruning.  I’m generally not very good with pinching out the laterals anyway and in the past have just put in a few more posts to support the ‘branches’ and as long as I kept watering I have got bumper harvests.  Pruning is not something you usually hear about in relation to growing tomatoes but a very wet December followed by (finally) some nice warm summer weather meant that the plants just took off.  I kept thinking that I ought to go out and trim them back a bit but when I finally got around to it they had gone rampant, swamping all the other plants, so they needed to be severely dealt to.

Thankfully I got to them just in time before I was having to cut off ‘branches’ that had fruit on them. I cut them right back to expose the developing fruit to the sun and removed a lot of the leaves to allow airflow and discourage disease.  Hopefully now they will put all their effort into ripening the fruit rather than growing more leaves.  I planted 3 different plants this year: a cherry tomato, a medium sized ‘Moneymaker’ tomato and a Roma tomato, so I hope that I will get to enjoy some of them at least.