The Devil's Weed Taught Me How To Grow The Devil's Fruit

With a tomato harvest, comes tomato work, the term I've given to the various set of tasks that keep your tomato plants healthy while allowing you the visibility necessary to harvest everything.  I first learned to do these tasks growing pot, as you do everything in your power as an indoor grower to achieve highest yield and quality possible.  From pruning to training to trellising, these are all tasks many growers all over the world utilize to get the best out of your plants.  

Something many people don't realize is that tomatoes prefer similar growing conditions to cannabis.  They like loose well draining, but fertile soil that gets dried out thoroughly between waterings.  In both crops, over watering often proves fatal, and is a common mistake most gardeners make when first getting started.  Both plants yield more when they are trellised if they need to be.  At a certain point, without trellising, weed plants get floppy and easy to break from the weight of the buds. Both plants love to be pruned, that is to have select foliage removed to promote air flow and to stimulate new growth in the areas we want it, the bud sites. Both plants also really enjoy training, or the act of manipulating the path of growth through various techniques.

Many professional cannabis growers use cages, often referred to as tomato cages to stabilize and support their branches during growth, especially the flower cycle.  The roma tomato plant shown above has it's own cage of sorts, in the shape of a teepee crafted from local sticks.  As I live on a windy ass mountain and it's hurricane season, I now have the roma weighted down with hunks of concrete, as I found it on it's side after a bad tropical storm.  Properly built a trellis will support the weight of heavy fruit or of resinous dank nugs of weed at all times.  There's nothing worse than visiting your garden to find a branch was too heavy and litterally tore itself off from the weight.  Often times these branches had mostly mature, but not entirely mature tomatoes or nugs on them.  When going for big dense nugs, or for big juicy tomatoes, it's best to start with some sort of trellis from the beginning, be it sticks in the dirt or a tomato cage purchased from the store.  

Tomatoes love to be pruned, which is really just removing certain foliage to help in all sorts of aspects really.  When you prune, you are suddenly able to see every fruit on the plant very clearly, which helps for harvesting.  The first pictures show my unruly tomato garden, needing to be harvested and pruned.  The next photo is a picture of my hand, with Fiskars shears(a brand worth bragging about), cutting off a sucker.  Suckers are what gardeners call foliage that is just vegetative in growth, with no potential for fruit production.  The next photo is of a sucker cut off, to show that while it looks like a whole branch with leaves, it's really just one leaf, with many little leaflets coming off the side of the one stem. These generally just grow, live, die and fall off the plant, generally offering nothing for the plant and actually draining energy.  When you cut these off, the plant focuses its energy on the fruit or flowers, as losing foliage in any way triggers plants to focus on reproduction. This is advantageous to the tomato farmer, as it not only provides great visibility for harvesting, it stimulates the plant to produce more of what they want, faster.  A well pruned tomato plant is generally also bursting with fruit, as it gives all of the nutrients and sun energy to the fruit instead of unnecessary foliage.  The last photo is an example of what you don't when to do when pruning suckers, that could have been fruit

Marijuana has the same feelings towards pruning that tomatoes do, although in cannabis farming the technique is called defoliation and is highly debated by some.  In my direct experience, I've noticed a huge difference between plants that are defoliated and ones that aren't.  Cannabis was actually the first plant I have ever pruned.  When pruning cannabis, you remove fan leaves, or long leaves that generally come off of nodes on the plant, where buds generally branch off too.  There are small leaves on the buds, as well as coming out of them that should be left, or the plant will go into shock.  Especially with indicas, removing a good amount of the fan leaves at various points during growth does both the plant and the grower some good.  It increases light penetration in the plant, especially important when growing in indoor circumstances.  This allows the buds more in the middle of the plant to get the light they need to grow.  It increases air flow, which decreases pests like mold or spider mites.  It helps the grower, as they have less leaves to remove when trimming the product at the end.

The first two photos show a technique referred to by tomato growers as mainlining and to cannabis growers as lollipopping.  It involves removing all the lower foliage off the main stem, as most of this doesn't recieve light and generally just takes up energy while producing little to nothing.  Removing this foliage in this way increases air flow by a great amount, which is essential in the jungle.  Here pests are abound, be they mold or bug and pruning seems to keep them at bay. The loppipopping technique ends with a cleared bottom of the plant, with often bushy tops.   The first photo also shows what we do with suckers when we are done, we use them as mulch. Tomatoes are narcissists and love their own leaves as mulch. As they break down, they return nutrients to the plant, providing way more benefit than they would had they been left on the plant.  They also keep the moisture level constant, which is important especially in dry climates. 

Lastly, both cannabis and tomatoes love to be trained, that is to have their growth manipulated.  This generally involves many techniques, trellising actually being part of it.  Trellises force plants to grow upwards, where they may instead grow along the ground.  There's a technique utilized by both cannabis growers and bonsai tree owners called supercropping in the cannabis world.  This involves softening a part in the branch, to bend it over and send the branch downward. Within a day, most plants have already turned their way back upwards, forming a knuckle at the bend that provides strength later on in life.  The first two pictures show a plant that was naturally supercropped in this way by the drip line of my house during a tropical storm.  The gentle downward pressure perfectly and gently bent the branch, to the point where it was pointing the opposite direction.  It's now turned it's way upward.  As you can see by the third picture, this happened to many branches and is a big part of why this section of the tomato garden is so unruly.  The other reason is there's a gigantic sexually frustrated tomatillo plant that I'll write about soon.  

The techniques I use on a daily basis for growing and maintaining my tomato plants are the same I was taught when I got into cannabis growing almost 5 years ago.  They sometimes have different names, but the end result is the same.  I often say it was weed that taught me how to grow tomatoes.  I learned all the needs of the cannabis plant and soon found tomatoes needed the same things to thrive.  I think about this fact every time I prune my tomato garden, as I'm struck by the irony of the illegality of the plant.  I use the same techniques to grow them, yet getting caught growing cannabis can ruin your life legally.