I do not prune and I certainly wouldn't top them.

I am glad to see this info. I always wondered too. I need abundance of peppers and I did not know they were heavy feeders.

Would espoma veggie fertilizer be good?

If I have the mind (ya'll know how that is), I'll test it out on something insignificant - like banana peppers. You know, test it. I'm not willing risk it on something important.

I have to grow mine in tomato cages or else they are prone to severe wind damage. I used to top them and even pruned tomatoes, but never noticed a significant difference. Now I just let them grow like mom nature wants them. She knows best!

I follow one lady on fb that tops her tomato plants at 12 inches to get a sturdier plant. I can't argue with her at all cuz she gets huge plants and awesome fruit. I guess the only way to know for sure is to do study of 2 like bon with the peppers.

luvcannin - Are they determinate plants?

I don't know I will ask her

I don't know why people feel the need to artificially manipulate plants. No one goes out into the pastures and forests and prunes or tops things, other than natural pruning done by wind, ice storms, pests, etc. I like to leave everything alone and let it grow the way it was meant to grow. I don't even prune my stone fruit trees like I "should", based on conventional agricultural practices. I'll prune them the first 2 or 3 years to help them develop a bowl shape, but then I don't really do any pruning after that, except to prune off a dead or damaged limb. I'm probably a neglectful and inept fruit grower because, by choice, I do barely any pruning and no spraying, but we get all the fruit we can eat fresh, have plenty for all the wildlife to "steal" and eat, and have to preserve tons and tons of it via canning, freezing and drying since we get so much that we cannot eat it all fresh before it spoils, so my hands-off method works just fine for us.

Some people top tomato plants late in their growing season to divert the energy of indeterminate plants and put all the energy into ripening up existing fruit before frost instead of putting energy into forming new branches, foliage and fruit that won't get a chance to mature before the first freeze. In that case, I understand why they do it, but I still don't do it myself. This year, we had ripening fruit on our tomato plants in mid to late November. If I had thought to myself in September "frost is coming in a few weeks, I'll top the plants", I wouldn't have had the fruit that set in September and in October and ripened in November. Here in our state, you never know if your first frost will hit you in September or in December, so I always let the plants produce as long as they can in the hope the first frost will be really late.

Kim, People in some climates can manipulate their plants because they never get hot enough, temperature-wise, for the tomato plants to stop setting fruit in the summer months. Here in our climate, if you top your plants early, you're pushing fruit set later into the season and taking the chance that you'll still get good fruit set before the heat sets in. I know from experience that I usually get fruit set at least through the third week in June, but in a really hot year (like 2011), there was almost no new fruit set after May because the type of heat that shuts down tomato fruit set arrived at our house in early May (actually it arrived in April, but then we cooled down for another week or two in May and got a little more fruit set).

Remember the heat when you contemplate doing anything that might cause tomato plants to set fruit later than they otherwise would. I do everything I can to push my plants to set fruit as early as possible and never, ever would do anything that would delay fruit set. I had friends in my county who set out their tomato plants at the "normal" time for us in 2011 and never got a fruit to set at all. The heat came too soon. Of course, being tomato obsessed, I had put all plants in the ground early that year when I could (fire season complicated things a lot that spring, but I put new plants in the ground weekly whenever I could) because we had warmed up incredibly early. Had I known how early the heat would arrive to stay, instead of squeezing in some planting weekly as my schedule allowed, I would have turned off the radio on one day and ignored the fires and just spent that whole day putting tomato plants in the ground in order to get it done. (Hindsight is 20-20, isn't it?) As it was, the plants that went into the ground earliest were the ones that produced the most fruit per plant, and the ones that went into the ground latest produced the fewest fruit per plant because of the shortened period of time to get fruit set. I learned a lesson from 2011 and now work harder to get the plants into the ground as soon as air temperatures and soil temperatures allow.

Dawn

Somewhere, over on the tomato forum here or perhaps another format, there is a thread about topping tomatoes to make them ripen in the fall. I researched it last year because my green tomatoes were just sitting there and DH's OCD makes him want to clear away my ugly jungle of waning tomato plants that he thinks are "done". Dr Carolyn Male, author of 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden, said she would never top a tomato plant. She said if you want the fruit to hurry up and ripen, then you have to make it think it's dying. The 2 methods were, grasp near ths roots, pull and twist. Don't pull it out of the ground, just enough to break some of the roots. The other was to thrust a shovel into the ground in a circle about 6 inches from the roots. Once again, this breaks some roots. The plant thinks it is dying and hurries to ripen seeds. She said she would only do this in an effort to get seeds before frost. Some one said that topping the plant only encouraged it to try to grow more leaves, not ripen fruit.

You can get into some major disputes on the prune suckers vs never pruning. What works for some doesn't work for others and some people get ugly about it. I think it is like Dawn says, the diffrences in climate. And maybe in the type of garden, like people growing for market, who have certain criteria regarding timing, ease of picking, spacing and maybe pesticide application, vs a home gardener who doesn't have time or inclination for pruning. Or personality. DH would love beautifully lined up staked plants carefully pruned just so...to bad he married a jungle gardener.

Yay for jungle gardeners!

I just got an answer. She plants only indeterminate and starts them right after Christmas. She has to grow them indoors longer than they are out so she can get a crop. She is in Colorado. I have followed her for almost 2 years and I know she gets a lot of tomatoes but she does have to work at it

Amy, Hooray for the Jungle Gardeners of the World! I am one and am proud of it. When God starts planting everything in the meadows and forests in nice straight perfectly clean rows, then I'll start planting my garden than way too. Even if I try to avoid a jungle look, I end up with one by May or June anyway, so why not embrace the craziness and just have a jungle by design?

Kim, In that climate, I bet she does have to work really hard within the confines of her growing season and harsh climate.

Dawn

I didn't start out to be a jungle gardener, but it happened. I didn't prune tomato plants even in Colorado..

I come from a long line of gardeners who never pruned their tomato plants (and that includes not pruning off suckers) and I am firmly in the no-pruning camp myself, for many good reasons. In our climate, the plants need all the foliage they can get to protect the tomatoes from sunscald. (That is even more true with peppers, which seem to me to sunburn even more easily than tomatoes.) Also, the leaves are the "factory" that conduct the photosynthesis that gives us plant growth and tomatoes. Why in the world would we want to reduce the size of the factory? If a person isn't feeding the plants excessive nitrogen, they aren't going to produce excessive foliage.

In some parts of the country where they have excessive moisture most of the time, high relative humidity most of the time, less intense sunlight, less heat, and the accompanying higher foliar disease pressure that comes along with that, and a significantly shorter growing season than we have, maybe someone could make a good argument for pruning. Maybe. Here? I just don't find that it makes any sense. There's a big difference in growing tomatoes in a short-season area where you are desperately trying to get them to set fruit and ripen it before September arrives (from a May or early June planting) and in growing tomatoes here where we normally can put plants in the ground in March/April and harvest until October, November or sometimes even December. I don't even pay much attention to what folks outside our region do with their plants because it rarely is relevant to what we do here in a different part of the country with different climate and weather conditions.

During the growing season, people often stop by (sometimes friends or neighbors, sometimes strangers) to chat about gardening when they see me out working in the front garden. They're always in awe of our big, healthy, productive tomato plants and want to know the secret. There isn't any secret---just plant them into good, compost-enriched soil and let them grow. If anyone tries to start the sucker-pruning discussion, I just shut that down pretty quickly by saying I don't do it, never have, never will....and no one can argue with my results because we get tons of tomatoes every year, and I have a canning pantry full of canned tomato products to show how excessive our harvest is. Most of the people I've met who prune suckers do so because that worked for them in an entirely different climate, or because they have been reading a book written by someone in a different region and it promotes the pruning of suckers. After trying it here for a while, they tend to adopt our local practices of not pruning off suckers. It only takes one or two years of repeatedly losing tomatoes to sunscald to get them to ease off the pruning. I have seen online wars fought over the pruning vs. not pruning of suckers.....and I refuse to engage in the arguments over this topic. People are gonna do what they're gonna do and it is their garden and they can raise their plants as they see fit.