I am a fairly new gardener. Please enlighten me on the pros and cons of pinching off the blossoms (tomato or any plants). I thought they needed the blossoms.
Hi there, since there were no replies yet about pinching off blossoms, here is my take on it.
On flowering bedding plants, OLD blossom removal, including the seed containing part, will encourage more blossoms because the plant “wants” to produce seeds (and they have been removed) , and the plant will be encouraged to make more flowers and seed heads. Leaving old seed heads on makes the plant “think” it has completed ( or is on the way to completing) its life mission of reproducing.
Petunias in particular, benefit greatly from seed head removal. They will become stringy, weak-stemmed plants without seed head removal.
Marigolds are prolific seed producers. I like to remove old seed heads so you don’t see the old brown flowers.
Impatiens will drop old petals on their own, but not the seed heads. However impatiens do fine without removing the seed containing part of the old flower.
Removal of new unopened flowering plant blooms is not good,unless the gardener is Morticia Addams, who famously snipped the heads of long stemmed roses off and declared them perfect.😊
In the veggie plant department, I recall reading that competitive (giant variety) pumpkin growers might snip off some blooms, leaving a few to mature to the biggest pumpkins possible. The theory is that fewer pumpkins might have a chance to get bigger than if all blooms were left on the plant.
I do not recall other veggie plants benefitting from flower removal, but I am sure one of our friends here will think of some.
🌸🌼🌺
My tomato plants started to blossom when the plants were super short which meant the fruit was going to be low to the ground where rodents could easily eat them.
I wanted the plants to grow taller so I basically pruned them.
I will find the original comment in the old thread and send you a link to the original question which I directed to Diana
I told Ern to do that.
When we have seedling we’ve grown ourselves or purchased, and they are still only around 8” tall or so, still not in the ground or in a pot and are producing blooms, those blooms need to come off.
We do it because that’s a sign that the plant is stressed out and not getting what it needs (as in, being in the ground!) and it thinks it’s gonna die, so it’s making fruit to propagate itself.
Once those blooms are pinched off and the plants are established in the ground or a pot, they can put their energy into root structure, and then they’ll shoot up, re-bloom at the proper time, and give you tomatoes or peppers or eggplant. (Usually it’s just peppers, tomatoes and eggplant that I do this to.)
Also - if you have a little plant with a big pepper or tomato on it, it’s more likely to break the stem due to the weight of the fruit. And - I’ve read that plants send out some sort of signal that bugs can hear when they are stressed, and the bugs zero in on those plants to finish them off! Eeek!
Anyhow, ‘scientists’ have done lots of studies, and no matter how ‘old’ you let a plant get before it goes into the ground, it doesn’t benefit them any more than if you had planted that 8” plant at the proper planting time for your zone.
Amazingly, the plants know exactly what to do! An 8” seedling will catch up to one that was planted at 12” in a mater of a week.