The studies that I read and followed were from Organic Gardening Magazine from the late 70's. It didn't mention anything about pruning staked plants. Kind of sounds like you pruned the staked plants to sque the outcome in your favor, which pretty much invalidates your study.

He described what he did and admitted he only had one plant of each. He did not claim that it was equal to a real scientific study. People reading can judge for themselves.

This was not a planned study, just me taking weights of fruits from my staked and caged plants. I pruned the staked plants to make the plants fit on the stakes, the way most people would. For the life of me I can't see how
I did anything to consciously or unconsciously skew my results one way or another.

I am not saying that pruned plants or staked plants yield smaller fruit. The point I was trying to make is that gray data results (light or dark) generally get turned into black and white dogma. This is often due to authors of magazine articles etc. interpreting scientific data to make it more exciting for laymen, or information aimed at commercial growers being applied to home gardeners. My results indicate that there is no reason to expect dogma (pruning = larger fruit) to hold for every home gardener.

From a scientific standpoint (yes, I am a real scientist)you can look at it as 8 replicates since they are all the same species, which is not a bad sample size. And since they are open pollinated, genetically stable varieties it would be the about the same as using 8 sets of identical twins. The variability among plants was surprisingly small considering that it is common for these varieties to produce fruit varying greatly in size (1/2lb to 2lbs) on the same plant and that there is a shift in sand/silt/clay ratio across my garden. The the data is tight enough as a pilot study to look into it further under better contolled conditions, which is why I reported it here as a counterpoint to the dogma. But there is really no reason
I can see to pursue this as a study. Home gardeners are generally not growing hybrids bred for consistent shape and size. They are often not growing under homogenous conditions of sunlight and/or water compared to a test field, and most importantly, it probably doesn't matter if there is a 10% difference either way in the average size of their tomatoes. The people who submit posts asking if they should prune or not are worried about screwing up, and maybe my results can help some of them understand that it doesn't make a difference for them.

Spiced - I've always been a strong proponent of not pruning and my personal results over the last 45 years support your data. I have always believed that the unpruned plants have more foliage to produce more nutrients for the plant and this will usually give a small percentage increase in sizes and flavor.

I also agree that, for most folks, the small difference is not a huge issue to consider. I do know that unstressed plants produce more fruit for a longer portion of the season, and the taste is much better overall.

Way to go. It's nice when folks take the time to try and test the norm. Seems like we always learn something when the "envelope" gets stretched.

Some folks just don't want to hear anything different. And some folks are simply not comfortable when their paradigms are in need of adjustment. (Smile)

Ted

Spiced Ham,
When you speak of pruning are you meaning the same thing as "suckering". Are you are pruning to leave only a few branches or just removing the new growth below the first blossuming? I sucker, but I don't prune

thanks john

Clearly anyone who prunes Heirloom indeterminate tomato plants doesn't really know what they are doing.
If someone wants "bigger" tomatoes the correct way is to prune tomatoes and flower clusters and not suckers and leaves.

Zebra, I think your missing the point. There was no "wanting" of bigger tomatoes. It was a study to see what would happen. And the pruning of suckers to three or four main vines is a perfectly logical way of controlling the plant mass tied to a stake. Actually four main vines is pretty generous at that.

Sack I didn't miss the point. Pruning Indet tomatoes will affect the production. HELLO! So to try and prove "caged tomatoes" that haven't been pruned out-produced staked plants that were pruned. I always stake my tomato plants and never prune them.More leaves=more tomatoes.
This is why the test was deceptive.
And also this post is in response to a post I made recently about an article i read in Organic Gardening in the late 70's. Which further makes this test "suspect".
A Real scientific would be to grow them side by side without pruning one or the other. And No, Pruning was done to sque the results in favor of the caged plants.

Pruning (reduction in number of vines) was the independent variable, support method (caged vs staked) was an unavoidable uncontrolled variable assumed to have an insignificant effect on fruit size (or assumed to skew size in favor of stakes, which the results did not support).

Pruning refers to suckering, reducing the overall number of vines, which is what the Purdue study looked at.
Maynard, 2000, Purdue Hort Dept, available online someplace. Note that I said the staked plants were pruned to 3-4 vines, Maybe I should have been clearer about that but because I don't consider leaf pruning (a'la "Organic Tomato Magic" to be in anyway beneficial to productivity so it wasn't on my mind. Any leaf pruning was done to get rid of foliage fungal damage, which was heavy this year. It was random among plants, but possibly heaviest for the caged plants because this year I did not do my usual minor suckering and/or leaf pruning, and as a result the inside of the cages were packed tightly with leaves, which facilitated heavier fungal problems. But I guess I don't know what I am doing if it seems like a good idea to me get "some" air flow into the cages at ground level.

Zebraman, this post was not in response to any post you made. I don't even recall reading such a post recently, and to be truthful, I don't understand what direction your concerns are coming from. The study I sited above, Maynard-2000, was the only study in my memory while writing the post. I don't even recall hearing about the Organic Gardening article before.

There can be no personal bias in this "test" to skew results towards caged plants, because the data was considered after the fact. I did not plan on comparing staked to caged sets until after I had collected the data. If anything results should have been skewed in favor of the staked plants because there was more foliage exposed to high light in proportion to fruit. The cages were packed full of vines trying to grow fruit using leaves shaded by the outer vines. Leaf radius of the two methods was not as dissimilar as the difference in fruit numbers, i.e the caged plants were not twice as wide as the staked plants.

My main goal in weighing fruits was not to test any hypothesis, but simply to compare production of the different varieties I grew this year. I split my plants into two sets because I have 24 cages and further room for about 20 staked plants. I can't compare production of Earl's Faux to Rose if I grow the first in cages and the second staked. After finding out which varieties were larger and produced more fruit I was just playing around with the numbers and decided to compare the fruit size between caged and uncaged after a I thought I saw a pattern.