As a gardener, it’s satisfying, as well as cost-effective, to grow your own veg. But waiting for your carefully-tended crops to be ready to eat can be a frustrating business. James Prigioni explains on The Gardening Channel that impatient gardeners can fast-track their tomato crop not by adding something, but by taking something away.
He said: “Pruning has some major benefits, especially when it comes to ripening. Tomatoes that are pruned tend to produce fruit 2 weeks earlier than ones that aren’t pruned.”
James says that before pruning, it’s important to know whether you’re dealing with Determinate or Indeterminate tomatoes. Determinate tomatoes, also known as bush tomatoes, are varieties that grow to a specific height, produce a single, concentrated harvest of fruit, and then stop growing, while Indeterminate varieties continue to grow and produce tomatoes until the arrival of the first frost.
Popular examples of Indeterminate tomato plant varieties include Beefsteak, Big Boy, Brandywine, Sungold, and Sweet Million, with their determinate cousins being represented by Roma, Celebrity, and San Marzano Nano.
James demonstrated his pruning technique on an Indeterminate tomato vine: “We want to prune our plants to a single stem.”
He explains: “The reason we do this, is because when we prune our plants, we are redirecting the energy from growing leaves and new shoots over to the production of fruit and the ripening of that fruit.
“It’s like we choose to make the plant focus on fruit instead of on the leaves because that’s what we want.”
If you don’t bother to prune your tomatoes, James warns, you’ll end up with an attractive-looking plant that’s big and bushy but doesn’t give as much fruit: “In my opinion, I’d rather have a tomato trellis loaded with fruit,” he says.
Allowing your tomato plants to develop into a bush has a few problems beyond the shortage of fruit, James adds: “When it comes to indeterminate tomatoes, being bushy like this isn’t ideal because it makes it much more susceptible to disease issues and the tomatoes ripen slower.”
James, who is based in the US, says that 2025 has been particularly tough for early blight, so he’s been growing the cherry bomb variety, which he describes as having “bomb-proof resistance and disease resistance to early blight.”
Here in the UK, some popular blight-resistant varieties include Crimson Crush, Fantasio and Sungold.
James says that, whatever variety you pick, a pruned plant will get a lot more airflow and light moving through it, which helps prevent diseases. And that in turn will help your plants ripen tomatoes faster.
