Joseph Lofthouse wrote:My community believes that pruning damages tomato plants, and reduces yields. Traditionally here, tomatoes grow sprawling on the ground.
In the wild, andean currant tomatoes (S. pimpinellifolium) and galapagos tomatoes (S. cheesmaniae) don't have to be pruned. The vines simply sprawl on the ground and take up secondary roots where the stems touch the ground. Then, any wildlife simply walks into the thick vines, eats the fruit and spreads the seeds once it goes to poop out the fruit remains.
For farmers, they usually desire to prune tomato plants to a single stem to make them easier to harvest and maximize airflow for domesticated tomatoes as a precaution against late blight and fungal disease.
Keep in mind that domesticated cultivars of tomatoes usually have poor resistance to late blight and fungal infections compared with wild tomatoes, with the exception of a few semi-wild cultivars of cherry tomatoes. As a result, many cultivars of tomatoes, even in a frost-free climate, never make it past their first growing season.
Conversely, most semi-wild cherry tomatoes and fully wild tomatoes have excellent resistance to fungal diseases so they often survive as short-lived perennials in frost-free climates living three or more years.
As for me, the main reason I've been pruning my tomatoes to a single stem in the past is to make them easier to harvest without potentially snapping secondary tomato stems and to reduce the risk that the secondary stems will make a trellised tomato plant too top-heavy and vulnerable to storm damage. The storm damage risk is more of a concern if the secondary branches are not already rooted in the ground.
Mandrake...takes on and holds the influence
of the devil more than other herbs because of its similarity
to a human. Whence, also, a person’s desires, whether good
or evil, are stirred up through it...
-Hildegard of Bingen, Physica
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