pruned the tomatoes

Today I got out and finally pruned my tomato plants. I have to say first, that my garden is horrifically bad this year. It is alive, and it did make it through the long vacation that we took this year; it did not do well in the long run however. While were gone there was a very early and severe heat wave. I am guessing that while the automatic watering system kept them alive, they were stunted from the start.
At any rate, I am getting tomatoes forming, and I finally got out and pruned them. I have found that when I string them up vertically and keep the superfluous growth down to a minimum, I get much better production.







Here are a couple of
before pictures.



I have found through trial and error that I get the best production, perhaps not the most production (I haven't really counted), but very good quality tomatoes when I prune them up away from the gound (My understanding is that this limits the chances of disease.) and renove the suckers. I am not a horticulturist or anything, so I only know what works for me. I define a sucker on tomatoes as the stem that forms between the main beam, and one of the leafs. If you look closely, you will see what I mean. (You probably already know.) It seems to me that in the instances that I have let these stems (suckers that is.) grow, because they may have flowers forming on them or look healthy, they rarely produce fruit consistently.

Here are a couple of after photos.