I know this sounds hilarious, but you have to understand … I have been known to drive around with these puppies and my gardening gloves in my car — you know, in case something needs a good trim? The biggest problem when I can’t find something I need is that I find other things to do. And look! I have a nice pair of loppers in my garage!

So … you get the picture. Poor Japanese Maple, your one branch was just a little too close to my head and it shaded the south edge of my garden just a few minutes too many. Half of the two-trunked Oregon Ash got it with a saw too. I guess the pine is lucky I finally found the pruners, because some blackberries pushing their boundary line got it instead of a third tree.

Clicking on any of the above images gets you a larger view.

As you can see from the pictures, looking underneath the plants will give you everything from dead leaves to sneaky weeds. And yes, that is some curly parsley thrown in there. Click on the thumbnails to see larger images.

My mom says a true Oregonian goes out in all kinds of weather. To one-up her on that notion, I say a true gardener will go out to save the garden in any sort of weather. So there I was, in thunder and downpour, standing in a sinking bed of mud, pruning and staking the tomatoes. (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to prune or stake when the leaves are wet, but it was either that or have a bunch of main branches on a few bushes snap off—I did what I had to do!)

This week’s (wet) lessons learned:

You do what you have to do, and sometimes it works out okay.

The tomatoes that were tied and pruned while wet were actually okay … so far. It’s probably not the best idea for an extended cold/wet snap, but it works for those freak storms like this one where the weather warms up significantly the next day. (And, again, you do what you have to do—a light pruning while wet was better than losing the entire branch from the weight.)

Small bamboo sticks don’t hold up to Oregon weather.

Those bamboo stakes I brought from California did not hold up very well in Oregon. You can see where the bamboo stake had snapped with water/weather/weight and is now running horizontally in the middle of this picture (larger version):

Free branches rock.

The cherrywood and curling willow branches I picked up for free off Craigslist, however, do stand up wonderfully. They are much taller, stronger, more flexible, and more resiliant than the little bamboo sticks. They also give the whole thing a new, funky vibe:

Weather is fun.

It is probably wise to count seconds between the thunder and lightning if you are standing outside and gardening in a storm. If they get too close together, run in the house … quickly.

Weather and environment can drastically change your plants.

One of the plants that took a huge topple was a red currant tomato. This particular plant (I have 2 of them) happens to be from a small packet of seeds from the Martha Stewart Collection at K-Mart that I bought about 3 years ago. The packet describes it as

‘Red Currant’ Tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum var. pimpinellifolium
A wild tomato from South America. Tangy, sweet, crisp, and just 1/2" in diameter. Very prolific, grows in long clusters on vigorous vines that are easier to harvest if trellised. Good disease resistance.

The first year, a "normal" weather year in Concord, CA, these seeds produced neat 4-5′ bushes with ample fruit and leaves. The second year, where we had late cold and then blazing heat, they were small little shrubs with a lot of fruit and barely any leaves. This year, after moving to Oregon, this same packet of seeds is producing these beautiful 6-8′ vines that I finally discovered after the storm and had a crazy time tacking up! It’s just amazing to see what an heirloom or wild variety of plant will do in response to changes in the environment, where as a modern variety of tomato (created for a specific commercial purpose) might not be able to adapt to changing weather conditions as well.

Plant spacing is not overrated.

As I’m considering how I would change things for next year, I definitely think I will make the garden bigger overall but put more traveling pathways within the garden. There’s nothing like having to fix these fallen tomatoes, stepping into the garden while balancing precariously around a bunch of sharp support sticks, and having my foot sink about 8" down. The one bit of good news, though, is that the ground has somewhat compacted—when I first added the dirt, the sink level was about 12-18" deep.

I can’t dismiss some of the benefits of the spacing, however. For example, my basil is growing fantastically in the filtered sunlight below the tomatoes, and my fall broccoli is being kept from blazing sun in the same manner. The soil is also drying out slower, the plants are working to support each other as they grow, and the planting density is doing a great job suffocating out most of the weeds.

My first experience in pruning tomatoes was actually an accident. I never pruned my tomatoes before the year my toddler daughter decided to cut off the tops from our snow white tomato seedlings. While I thought it would just kill the plant, it didn’t … the end result was actually some really nice, compact plants with a lot of delicious tomatoes. The following year was a bad year in terms of weather, and I trimmed the tomatoes back to allow more airflow into the bush as it seemed to be making mostly leaves and no tomatoes. It helped, but the main problem was the weather and not the pruning itself.

If I had endless amounts of space in my garden, I would just let all my tomatoes go without pruning them except in cases of damage or disease. As that is not the case, this year’s pruning is done in terms of heath and space. Please note: I do my pruning in several passes in order to evaluate the garden as a whole, because it’s not just each individual plant that matters but the health of the garden as a whole.

Step 1: Evaluate and Support as Needed

Sit down and look at all of your plants for a while before you begin pruning. (I really think that careful observation is a very important and underutilized skill in gardening.) Do you see anything drooping? Curling? Yellowing or a different color than the others? Does anything need to be staked or straightened to allow to healthier growth? Is something not getting enough sun and should be moved? Take care of all of these things before you begin pruning.

Step 2: Prune for Health

On my first pass at pruning, I take off any branches that look like they are struggling, yellowing, diseased, or too low to the ground. You never want a full branch of tomatoes on a weak branch or one too low to the ground, because the branch will just bend or break before all those tomatoes can get ripe. Leaves and tomatoes that lay in the ground are also more prone to damage, insects and disease, like this:

I also like to take off lower leaves and stems if I feel like a plant is too "bushy" because it seems like those leaves keep me from being able to easily water the base of the plant. A before (top) and after on this kind of trimming on a Stupice tomato:

Step 3: Prune for Overall Garden Benefit

If you have a large garden with ample room, you may just want to stop now and leave your plants as they are. If not, you may want to prune for the health of the "herd". In my garden, I grow rows of basil and flowers below the rows of tomatoes, so I trim off enough bottom branches from the tomatoes to give this kind of clearance:

You may have other criteria for this third step, such as wanting to trim off the suckers (side shoots) from the tomato plant to keep the plant compact, or clipping off the top to keep the height down and encourage more growth of the suckers. I tend to keep more leaves on the upper parts of the plant, to shade the soil so it will retain water, but some people like to clip more leaves off if they have more problems with insect pests. Just remember: Your pruning will vary year to year, try to learn from your experiences, and it’s better to not prune enough than to prune too much.

The first one is a taller tree, 6-7′, that looks nice from one side

but you can see it’s all leggy and doesn’t have a lot of leaves from the other. Actually, it may even be 2-3 plants, spaced closely together, and none of them seem to be doing any new growth from the base.

I’m going to leave these ones as they are though, because my daughter loves to play on the bottom. It does need some work for general health, because it seems to have some sort of fungal problem on the leaves. I’ll wait until its new pink blossoms fade and then I’ll do a bit of tender care. I don’t know any of the history of these shrubs as we just moved in here …. so all I have to go on is the current state of the plant and any evidence of past trauma or pruning.

In the front yard, I have 4 of them. Two seem to be getting enough sunshine, have a nice shape to them, and look like they needed to be deadheaded but will otherwise produce some nice magenta flowers this season.

The other two are some leggy variety, need some serious help, or they are not getting enough sun from being under a large conifer tree. It looks like they both did have some heavy pruning down to the base at some point and did not regrow from it, so I’m not sure if a rejuventation pruning would even work in this case. I may just have to accept how sparse they are.

And then there is this one in the back yard, which sits in the shade of a maple tree. It seems to have done some base regrowth after a pruning, so I may have some luck in helping this one to come back a bit stronger.

There you have it—7 or 8 in all!