sorry for the misspells leafs,determinate,bury

Air pruning method?? Screen? Basket?

If I understnd your post correctly you are making the whole process far more complicated than it needs to be. Tomato cuttings are one of the easiest things to root there is and "making clones" or rooting cuttings is a very common practice among growers. I do close to 50 of them a season myself. It is an easy way to get multiple plants from one.

But no special techniques are required. You just snip off a growth tip or a lateral branch (what some call a sucker), stick it in a small container of wet potting mix in the shade and a few days later you have another plant. No hormones or innoculants or anything else needed. As for any pinching or pruning, that is your choice. But it sure isn't needed for any reason. ready to stick in the ground.

Check out the hundreds of past discussions here on rooting cuttings.

Dave

Dig, Sorry for my poor explanation . This is not abt. Tomato cuttings. My first statement was to comment on the good success I've had with air pruning. If you look on you tube, you will find many examples,a search on this forum will produce more.It will also explain the basket and screen.Some of my questions were burying the stem horizontally and the other was pruning the sucker off the determinant bush.

Just looking for suggestions on how to improve my gardening.Thanks for your comment.

William, during your previous posting re mycorrihizal fungus you explained purchasing wire baskets and screening to experiment with air root pruning. I have also developed a similar method over the past three years which is working well and I continue to use it for growing container plants. I have explained my method in an answer to an air root pruning question asked on the Garden Writer's Forum. That posting is near the top of the Forum. Check it out.

I don't do it, but many people bury the stem horizontally. The idea is that there's potentially more root area. Meh... I would only do it if the container, or the plant stem, were so tall to make it unwieldy to plant normally.

To my thinking, pruning a determinate variety would not be the most advantageous effort. There's only a limited number of fruiting branches and trusses, why cut them off?

Sorry but I can't find any discussions on this forum about air pruning and in all my years here I only recall one person posting about something similar.

Your link above leads to an IT commercial page. Nor do most consider YouTube a prime source of info in many cases. But it is your choice of course as experiments can sometimes be interesting. Not necessarily beneficial when compared to well-proven practices, but interesting.

At any rate it is a very unusual and overly complicated method of growing tomatoes vs. standard methods normally discussed on this forum. Sounds more relevant to the hydroponics forum perhaps.

As rgreen said burying the stem horizontally is a common practice for overly tall plants, did several that way myself this year due to the delay in planting, and it poses no problems for the plants. They root exceptionally well. Removing "suckers" from determinate varieties is never recommended due to the lost production.

Dave

Dave right at the top of the page on the right hand side next to Houzz you will see "search in garden web" put in "air pruning" there are 9,992 discussions on this subject. thank you for your input we're are all here to learn.

nandina(8b) I don't believe I said wire basket, if I did its my mistake all my baskets are dollar store laundry baskets. I'm glad you are having good success keep up the good work! Thank you for the heads up I will read.

Yes we all are here to learn so a brief lesson on how the Search here works if you don't mind. It is boolean and that takes some getting used to and can be confusing.

In other words it responds to ALL the terms typed in the search bar. In this case it it listing any and all discussions with the word "air" or the word "pruning" in the title or in the discussion. When one then scans the discussions it lists you quickly discover that more than 95% of them are about pruning (in the usual sense) - trimming leaves and branches - from your plants.

So given the normal connotation of the term "pruning" in any discussion about tomatoes it is impossible to find anything here on "air pruning" other than your discussion and a couple on air layering.

All the literature on air pruning is relatively new in the world of tomato horticulture - 3 to 5 years - and since it requires special equipment, greater time and effort, has no commercial value, and since the few comparative studies that have been done under controlled conditions have yielded little improvement in production it has been relegated to the hobby growing realm along with many other gardening fads.

But that issue aside the documentation on both issues of horizontal planting and pruning determinate varieties is pretty well established and documented.

Dave

Air pruning I suppose refers to the "pruning" of root tips getting dried out in netpots and textile grow bags. Meh. In my experience,choose a good soil mix and you will get the aeration you need, and choose a pot with enough capacity and all is well. I think it is a fad for those people who do not have the patience to learn what kind of soil their tomato plants thrive in... but the question:

I pinched off the sucker to encourage a better root system some suggest
to pinch them off others leave them on.Did I do good or bad?

Bad. Tomato plants have been trying to make max tomatoes longer than me and you. No matter what I do, I cannot get high yield by pruning anything. My job is just to help the plant avoid disease, which it is too dumb to do in Florida, and step out of the way and let it unleash production. I do not grow in optimum conditions. Mostly just 7 gallons of combination mix and compost (not favored by most - but that's all I afford) in a plastic bag. I get 15 - 20 pounds per beefsteak plant in a very short season and that is ok for me. I never prune flowering growing tips unless they absolutely are causing my terrible growing layout a PITA.

The only justification for pruning besides bragging rights for growing the biggest tomato (I was into that once and it worked), at the expense of maximum yield, is fitting it to your support. If your plant had a new side shoot, it was not a sucker, it was not stunting roots, it was only putting out more solar collectors closer to the damaged roots to build them up again. And then you ripped it out and left the plant barren. Poor plant. All these people on youtube and we forum folk all telling it how to grow, pruning, training, doing all kinds of busy-work without taking its will into consideration au natural to make more tomatoes with a brand new stem, perhaps it felt it needed a new main stem for its fresh new life ;-)! JMO and sure pruning has a place for those who enjoy mutilating their plants to fit their growing layouts.

Cheers

PC

Well, if in the search bar, you type "air pruning", with quotes, it will indeed find a number of posts about air pruning, a few of which are in this particular forum. The list starts out with posts with "air pruning" in the title, and continues with posts with those words in the body. I still don't have a clue what air pruning is, but I guess the answer is here somewhere.

thanks for the advice (FL 9a) I'll give it a try.Now I'm sorry I took it off.

Dan I made a mistake by putting it in quotes ,I did it to separate the words from the rest of the sentence.Sorry for the error. You can get an Idea about it by looking it up on you tube.

Dan IT seemed you wanted to know more abt air pruning there is a quick review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FrDkaZH7m0&t=170s