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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >My parents, who learned their garden ways in the 1930's and 40's,  
> pinched out all the "suckers" that sprouted between any other two  
> branches of the stem.
> 

I quit pruning tomatoes years ago.  

My best guess as to how the pruning got started is this:   People who have an 
interest in something tend to overdo it to the point that they start making 
up stuff to do, stuff that is utterly insignificant or even counter 
productive. 
 Goat keepers are the worst although any animal fruit or vegetable falls prey 
to this.  If you keep sheep, goats, horses, cows, donkeys,. turkeys, ducks, 
rabbits, quail, ducks, honeybees, chickens, on a farmstead, you tend to do 
whatever works well and no more.  Not time or extra attention available for 
it.

But if you only keep goats, you tend to see everything as something you ought 
to be doing.  Rare minerals, specialized feed, remove the horns, trim the 
hooves every two weeks, supplement with this or that, prophylacically treat 
for 
all and sundry rare diseases,  agonize over whether to milk from the left 
side 
or right, act as goat OB when they are kidding, hallucinate over minute or 
non-existent differences between breeds etc. etc.

If the homesteader is also tending eight or ten other animal species, they 
tend to do just what works and go on.  Oddly their goats do fine with a 
minimum 
of attention.

I think that same sort of thing crept in because many people grow gardens for 
tomatoes only, or tomatoes and very few other things.  And rightly so.  But 
then they plant those tomatoes and during hte weeks and weeks that they just 
watch them grow, they think to themselves, I ought to be doing something.  

There might have been real reasons for pruning tomatoes under some 
circumstances and under some methods of cultivation, but I suspect it got 
proliferated 
as something you 'ought' to do without much more thought or experimentation.

The only "pruning" I do is that the suckers that grow at the joint of an 
indeterminate tomato can be snapped off and planted and they will grow 
another 
tomato plant.  I use this as a hedge against blight.  The parent plant is far 
more prone to blight with the new rootlings rarely getting it.  Those cool 
wet 
spells might take out the older plant but the rootlings survive to make 
tomatoes 
in the fall.

James   </HTML>