Tomato Cuttings and Stringing Them Up Tomatoes are some of the most popular fruits to grow at home, and they’re my personal favorite as well. Depending on where you live, you might have a long enough growing season to get back-to-back plantings going, and it’s not always fun to start from seed. Or you might want to give away some plants to friends and neighbors. You might even have a friend who grows amazing tomatoes and you want one of those for yourself.
Whatever the case, it’s extremely easy to grow new tomato plants from cuttings. If you’re not familiar, it is exactly what it sounds like—a piece of an existing plant that you cut off. No roots, no nothing. Just a piece of a plant and some dirt.
At this point, people sometimes like to use rooting hormone. In my experience this is entirely unnecessary for tomato plants—they root so easily, there’s no need to spend the money on it. Plus, many commercial rooting hormones contain pesticides, meaning they’re not fit for organic gardening. But if you want to use it, you can—there are other plants that don’t root so easily, so if you plan to take cuttings from other things, it might be useful.
What is a Sucker on a Tomato Plant?
The short answer to this is a tomato sucker is a smallish shoot that grows out of the joint where a branch on the tomato plant meets a stem.
Determinate type tomatoes don’t really require any pruning at all. Determinate tomatoes tend to be more compact. They reach a certain height and then stop growing. They don’t usually set their fruit until the branches are pretty much fully grown and then they set their fruit all at once. Since no new fruit will be developing after pruning, nothing is gained by pruning.
