Help pruned Tomato plants too much

Ruth is right, given a long enough season you should still be able to recover. But in the future, I would recommend that you do not prune any leaves off at all unless they are starting to show some desease, and there are about 3 main ones out there that are eventually probably going to show up. The leaves are what keeps the plant alive. As strange as it sounds, they actually eat and digest sunlight and send that back to all parts of the plant for growth with the nutrients that the roots get from the soil. You can prune off what are known as "suckers". These start to grow out where a leaf meets the main stem and also at the base of the plant. But I usually let 1 or 2 of these from the base go.  The leaves also help to shade the fruit in the heat of the sunner and prevent sunscald on the tomatoes.

I don't want to confuse you too much but here is another thing about these plants, there are 2 main types; determinate and indeterminate. Its the way they grow and set out blossoms. A determinate plant usually grows more bushy. It sets its blossoms on the end of its growing branch tip and then sends out a side branch and repeats the process. These you need to be more careful how you prune. Some people reccommend not pruning them at all, I only prune them to keep them from getting too bushy.  They tend to grow to about 4-6 feet and produce all thier tomatoes pretty much in a short period of time

The Indeterminate types do it a little different. They have 1 main stem (if you have been pruning the suckers). They set thier blossoms off the main stem opposite and up from where a leaf is. These will just keep on going up. They can grow 10 feet tall during a typical season although 6 -8 is probably more like it. ( In green house growing they will let them go to 30 feet  on cords and just keep lowering the cord as the grow.) These will keep producing tomatoes on the new growth as long as they are growing and healthy.

I start anywhere from 300 to 600 plants a year and sell most of them at planting time here in Wisconsin. Most of them I sell to coworkers. I like trying different kinds and grow mostly what are known as "Open pollinated" and "heirloom." I'll only plant about a dozen or so for myself.

If your interested, here is a website I started years ago. I had good intentions of keeping it up but was just too busy with other things.

http://www.angelfire.com/ma4/tomatoes/in...