Boost your tomatoes with one essential job — they'll be 'bigger and tastier'

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Tomato plants have a pesky habit of sprouting excessive leaves while offering up scarce fruits.Nonetheless, gardeners can strike a fine balance between foliage and fruit growth, and even enhance the flavour of their tomatoes, by giving them a good trim.Gardening guru from Tree Vitalize, Fern Berg, shares that steering your tomato plant's energies towards bearing fruit rather than sprouting leaves means "you get the benefit of bigger and tastier fruit", adding that this isn't the singular advantage of pruning.Trimming enables more sunlight to immerse your plant, fuelling photosynthesis and resulting in "converted into lovely tomatoes for you to eat".

It also exposes your plant to more sunshine, encouraging vigorous and upright growth, along with an "overall healthier plant more able to withstand pests and diseases", reports the Express.

Learning when to prune is as pivotal as knowing how. Berg advises: "When it comes to timing, you should begin pruning your tomato when the plant reaches about one to two feet in height, then once a week throughout the growing season."Ensure your pruning shears are both sterile and sharp, which aids in preventing the spread of disease, so your hard work doesn't go awry.Starting your pruning regime, focus first on any sick-looking leaves, which may appear brown, yellow, or spotty.Firstly, identify the tomato plant suckers; these are the side shoots that sprout in the "V" between the main stem and branches of your plant.

Fern advised: "These are what you will be pruning off to control the size and shape of your plant."While gardeners may choose to remove all suckers, leaving only the main stem, this is often seen as an "extreme option" which "may reduce the plant's productivity" and could