Kitchen Garden Forum

Our greenhouse tomatoes (Gardeners Delight) are setting very well and the plants now have five trusses and one even has a sixth appearing. I believe the usual advice is to have just four trusses per plant but it seems churlish to cut the others off. Am I jeopardising the bottom trusses by leaving them all on or should I cut the fifth (and sixths) off? After all, with that variety I am not after huge fruit. They are growing in growpots in extra large growbags and are now fed regularly with tomato feed.

I just leave them until they run out of space in the top of the greenhouse if there is still plenty of time left, after all commercially they lower them and let them carry on (or at least they used to, don'y know if it is the current method).

I''m always greedy and let my tomatoes go on flowering and fruiting until the colder autumn,weather closes them down. Of course if you grow so many tomato plants that you can afford to make do with fewer trusses I imagine you might get slightly bigger fruit but as long as you feed them regularly I guess it doesn,t really matter. I think the later trusses just bear smaller fruit but thats probably also a result of declining sun and temperature levels

I usually leave mine till nine trusses I regularly have tomatoes into November if the weather is mild ,I Finnish up with a few green ones which ripen ok in our garage in a cardboard box , I always thought you stopped out door tomatoes on four to five trusses

I always leave them and provide extra support if necessary. It doesn't affect the first trusses although the later ones have smaller fruits on the beefsteak varieties. I don't bother with outdoor tomatoes to avoid blight so can't say whether you should stop them or not, but I suppose it gives you a chance to get some fruit before the blight gets them later on.

There won't be any blight this year....now there's a nice thought....

Many thanks. I will just let the plants have their own way up to the roof!