In article , miklol
writes
My tomato plants are now starting to flower what do I do now? The gardeners
delight variety I believe needs the side shoots removed and maybe stopped at
a certain number of trusses, but do I treat the tumbler variety the same
way? In fact any advice would be welcome.

Whether to remove side-shoots is optional. If you do, you should have
less bigger sized fruits, if you don't, you'll have more smaller ones.

That said, as a rule of thumb it is more usual to remove the side-shoots
from indoor tomato plants - i.e. grow them as cordons, because they take
up less space. By the same token, it is more usual to grow outdoor
tomatoes as bush plants because they will withstand outdoor conditions
better. Gardeners Delight are suitable to be grown either way, but their
chief attraction is in their ability to produce large numbers of tasty
bite-sized fruits - thus they more often tend to be grown bushy. Tumbler
plants are normally left to grow as they will. Their trailing stems may
throw side-shoots or not according to variety and growing conditions.

We stop our indoor cordon grown plants at four or at most five trusses
for a number of reasons. Their fruits tend to have better flavour and
texture; we like to clear the plants out of the greenhouse quite early
or they will conflict with the grape harvest; by the time the top indoor
truss is ripening, our outdoor tomatoes are being picked, so we have
plenty of crop for all purposes including freezing.

We shall be picking our first Harbinger tomatoes in 7-14 days time -
they were started in early February and have been grown in a polytunnel.
We shall go on picking from then until the first frosts stop the plants
- Nov/Dec with any luck. Saving some of the later half-ripe fruits often
gives us fresh home grown organic tomatoes for the Yuletide table.
--
Alan & Joan Gould - North Lincs.