Why I’m Topping my Tomatoes

A topic you hear about from time to time if you frequent online gardening communities, tomato topping is particularly useful when it’s late summer and you haven’t had any ripe fruit yet but there’s loads of fruit set.

When you top a tomato plant, you’re removing the growing tip of the plant, sending a signal that no new flowers or fruit need to form. It sends the signal to focus on ripening the fruit that it has already produced. We are merely helping our plants shift their focus to ripening the fruit that’s set rather than encouraging more flowers and fruit to come.

To top your tomatoes, simply find all the leaders and cut a good 2’ off the top of all the new growth. My hand in this photo is approximately where I like to cut mine off. You might cut some fruit off, but there should be lots of fruit in various stages of maturity lower down on the plants, if summer has been good to you.

Some newly formed fruit definitely got chopped off, and that was accidental, particularly on the larger slicers. I have zero regrets to dropping some of the newest sun gold fruit clusters.

Most years, our summer tomato garden is sunsetting by early September due to disease pressure. So I’m not super concerned about topping the tomatoes this week, a few weeks earlier than years past. Also, I’m honestly not sure how many more weeks I can bare glancing at all the disease pressure in the heirloom tomato bed. These plants may come out by early September this year.

Topping your indeterminate tomato plants about 6 weeks before your first frost will help the fruit that has set start to ripen. It signals to the plant to not continue to push out new flowers but instead focus on what’s right in front of it. Sort of a nice reminder for us too, this time of year when things feel like they are going here, there, and everywhere (because sometimes they are).

Because we’ve typically been satiated by 2+ months of daily, bottomless bowls of fresh tomatoes, I’m as spent and satisfied as my hard-working, tired plants — and would rather just yank the badly diseased plants and feel the sigh of relief as the landscape opens back up a little, a sign that we are entering a quieter garden season with foods that are shelf stable in and out of the garden.

Last year’s tomato bed was much less disease prone, and I can’t quite explain why. I miss this beautiful garden honestly. This year’s brutal disease pressure is trying my patience.