Pick first tomato flowers?

Does anyone do this? I've heard conflicting reports to pick the first flowers off so that the tomatoes can be stronger?

Reading around the net it seems like there's no consensus? -- Most suggestions are do it for indeterminate but not determinate?

Anyone?

Picking the first flowers is important for peppers. I have never done it for tomatoes and never noticed any ill effects. In any case tomatoes typically do not set fruit very well and drop many VERY small fruits (less than the size of a cherry pit) when exposed to temperatures in the low fifties with temperatures in the forties being particularly bad. I would not be concerned about having too heavy a fruit load on small tomato plants with the weather we have had in the last couple of weeks.

Ditto ekreider. It's been so chilly lately that many of those fruits will drop. No worries. I've also never done it, even when the weather was perfect, and have never had problems.

I've never picked my pepper or tomato flowers before. I haven't had a TON of luck growing sweet peppers, so maybe that's necessary for them. I have had a lot of success with habenero, serrano, and cayenne tho. Maybe I will pick the first flowers this year. Do you pick the flowers when they bloom or when they are just beginning to bud?

Somewhat related, here is an excellent guide for pruning tomatoes:
http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/art ... atoes.aspx

Pruning is an interesting topic....and potentially contentious, lol.

I have tried both. I find that when I am growing on land, I prefer to just leave them grow. My yields are perfectly fine (but you do need a good staking procedure!). But, in the containers, I do like to prune most suckers. I leave maybe two main stems (not one) and it works out well. If you prune too much, you can get sunscald...and they look naked! I like it when the branches are willy nilly - they look so robust! But, in a container, too many branches can be daunting.

Per the peppers, I think you'll get varied answers. It doesn't matter when you remove it as long as it's gone before it gets pollinated and produces fruit. Some people say that if you don't remove it, the plant will put it's efforts into producing fruit, and not into growing. Others say that if you have fertilized well, this doesn't happen. One argument I read said that you pinch all blossoms until the plant is as tall as it's supposed to be. Another argument is that if the plant is stressed, remove blossoms, but if it's not, leave them....(yep, it's like the tomato sucker debate...)

If it's cold, like it has been, the plant may drop the first blossoms anyway, so no decision needs to be made! I wonder if it would help to put row covers on these plants that love the heat during cold spells like this. (My okra is very unhappy....)

I probably should have qualified my comment on removing early pepper blossoms as applying to large-fruited types. These often start producing buds on plants that are six to eight inches tall and so have nowhere near enough leaves to produce good fruits let alone grow well at the same time. I take off only the first buds on the central stem at about the stage where the buds are about the size of buckshot and easily pinched off without nipping any tiny leaves. This lets the plant grow enough to support reasonable fruit and produce well. An eight-inch plant trying to produce a couple of six to 10 inch long fruits just does not work well and becomes stunted.

Many of the small-fruited hot types produce flowers near the tips of branches and start blooming on more developed plants than most large-fruited peppers. Peppers with this growth habit do not need to have early blossoms removed.

One problem with too many internet gardening discussions is that the United States is a big country with a lot of climatic variation. Tomatoes are sensitive to too much heat or sun yet require a fair amount of both heat and sun. Any pruning is partially in response to local conditions and such variables as staking on a single stake versus trellising or caging. I grow my indeterminate tomatoes on trellises and do limited pruning as part of training on the trellises. I do not prune Gold Nuggets, which are determinate and grown in cages. Some of the doctrinaire stuff about tomato pruning seems to come from over generalization.

While tomatoes' problems with low temperatures are noted earlier in this thread, tomatoes have trouble producing blossoms and setting fruit when night temperatures are above 85 degrees. This is why gaps in production are common in late summer in Chicago following blistering hot spells weeks earlier.

I had a lot of success pruning my tomatoes in SIP's last year. I didnt go crazy or anything, but tried to maintain 2-3 main stems. from just 2 plants I got more than my wife and I could eat. (Growing 6 this year tho for canning)

My tomatillos and poblanos are also having a rough time from the cold and wind this year =(

Havent gotten super far yet this year but heres progress so far: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheattoast ... 115597629/