Tomato Pruning and Insect Spray Questions

My favorite mom’s sister asked me a couple of questions today, and I thought they were worth a post since they seem to come up a lot.  Plus, I don’t have anything else to talk about today.

1.) Do you know anything about tomato pruning?

I usually prune my indeterminate (vining) tomatoes to two main stems and continue to pull off all the suckers (i.e., the growth in the “crotches” between stems).  I also thin the fruit to one or two per cluster.  When it starts to cool down in fall, I (try to) pinch off the growing tip and not let it set any more fruit.

Determinate (bush) varieties, I don’t do anything with…they don’t seem to benefit from the pruning as much, and they don’t get nearly as out of control without it.  Sometimes I thin the fruit a bit if they get crowded.

In both cases, after they’re large enough, I prune off the bottom leaves to keep them off and away from the soil.  They’re mostly shaded anyway and just serve to block airflow and pick up soil-borne diseases.

To be fair, some people think that tomato pruners are losers who need to get a life.  While there’s some truth to that, my experience is that you actually get more, better yield with pruning because you concentrate the resources of the plant on producing fewer, better fruits.  It’s like buying a couple good pairs of pants instead of several that don’t fit quite right.

2) What is a good safe spray to kill bugs on Bell Pepper plants?

Firstly, I’ll stick in here that the only really effective way to handle pests is to identify them first.  I recommend Bt for hornworms below, but that’s useless against flea beetles, for instance.

OK. Spray!  My favorite stuff to spray as a general purpose thing– since you didn’t specify the problem– is neem oil.  It’s insecticidal and fungicidal without having much impact on beneficials (unless you shoot them directly).  In India, it’s used for all kinds of stuff– including toothpaste.

The other very safe option is insecticidal soap (potassium salts of fatty acids, but a diluted pure soap will do in a pinch).  These are particularly useful for aphids, I find.

There’s a chemical called spinosad out these days that’s supposed to be quite safe (a bacterial fermentation product), but requires a bit more care with regard to bees, in particular.  However, it’s supposed to control some difficult characters– like leaf miners. I’ve had pretty good results with it, but I’m not sure that it’s been any better than neem, which I prefer.

If it’s hornworms, I’d go with Bt (bacillus thuringiensis). Except for the fact that Monsanto is engineering plants with built-in Bt, and thus almost certainly introducing resistance to this very useful staple of organic gardening, it’s wonderful stuff for most catepillars– especially cabbage loopers, cabbage worms, and hornworms.

Finally, pyrethrins are sort of a generic organic insecticide– which I’m not super keen on.  It’s relatively safe, but I try to keep my impact on the actual out of control problem so as not to knock the predators out of whack– which just makes things worse.  Pyrethrins are whatchacall “broad spectrum”.

If you know who the culprit is, I can maybe make some better suggestions.

Probably more than you wanted to know… but every year, I bounce around between letting nature provide the balance and realizing that nature doesn’t necessarily WANT me to grow tomatoes; I am not some indigenous person in a loincloth picking berries off of a native plant, after all.  Though, I do wear a loincloth when I garden, but that’s a different thing.

Anything else I need to know?

I don’t know.  Is there?  Can you tell me when you find out what it is?  I’m starting to understand why all the really good gardeners are 80.