CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s mid-June and most vegetable gardeners have already moved on to pruning their tomato plants, instead of transplanting them. It’s far too late in the year to plant more tomato seedlings. Or is it?

One reader’s advice is to turn those pruned “suckers” into new tomato plants. And that’s what I’m working on right now.

“Put suckers in water to root, then plant them in potting soil. For buying 6 plants, I got over 15 plants for me, my son and neighbor.” - Ray

“Suckers” is admittedly an odd term, but it’s the widely used name when it comes to tomato anatomy.

A tomato plant will have a “main stem” or trunk, branches of leaves that collect sunlight, and flower clusters that eventually become fruit. But in-between the leaf branches and main stem are something called suckers, sometimes called side shoots.

These suckers are essentially clones of the original tomato plants — and there are a lot of them. If left for long enough the suckers will create their own leaf branches, their own flowers and their own suckers.

It can be hard to identify them, but suckers usually come out of the armpits of the plants. If the main stem is vertical and the leaf branches are at 90 degrees, suckers usually grow at a 45 degree angle upwards.

Should you prune these suckers?

The short answer is no for determinate tomato plants that only grow to a certain height. And it’s a yes for in-determinate tomato plants that grow indefinitely. Different gardeners have different methods and strategies.

I don’t care how you prune your tomato plants. But if you prune them, the suckers present an interesting opportunity. New plants.

One more weird thing about tomato plants is that they can create adventitious roots. Unlike most plants, any part of a tomato plant’s main stem can create new roots. This is why you can plant tomato seedlings deep in the soil.

That same phenomenon allows you to take the suckers you’ve pruned and turn them into new tomato plants.

Here’s what you do:

1. Prune your tomato plants. You usually want to prune suckers when they’re small and can be pinched off. But to get a new plant, you should wait until they’re about four inches long.

If the suckers have grown their own branches and flowers it may help to cut those off as well.

2. Place the pruned suckers in a cup or jar filled with water. If left for long enough, they should start to develop long roots.

You can also plant these suckers into a small pot, but it will be harder to see if roots are developing. If you do this, keep the soil moist. This should take about a week.

3. Eventually those suckers start to look like tomato seedlings. From here you can transplant into the soil.

There’s hundreds of videos and articles online showing you how to do this — some will obviously give you different (or better) advice than I am.

A good source on these suckers is this article from the University of Georgia’s extension office. This video from Epic Gardening gives a good overview of tomato pruning and suckers.

People will no doubt argue about how to prune or not prune tomato plants. Single leader vs double leader? Only under the first flower cluster? Find your own way. Either way, you’ll have suckers.

You can clone tomato plants, but should you?

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. But even late in the gardening season I’d argue that you should try cloning your tomato plants.

Obviously, this is better advice to follow in March or April. Ray, the reader who suggested this, advises that you should buy tomato plants early and keep repotting them.

That gives you time to propagate and clone new plants before you set up your garden in May.

But even now I’d argue cloning free plants is a good idea.

Take my garden for example. I started tomato plants from seed this year and I started far too many. I’ve planted about 50 and given away about 100 plants. And killed about 100 or more, too.

But when it comes to special varieties, like cherry tomatoes or Black Krim, I only have one or two of those kinds of plants.

This sucker cloning allows me to get more of a kind of plant that I have only a few of. And I didn’t need to buy another seed packet.

July is late for new tomato plants. However, many tomato plants fall victim to disease by the end of August. By starting a late round of tomato plants through cloning, I hope to have a few plants that will produce even when my main crop dies off.

Plus, these suckers are free. I have to prune them off my plants anyway. Other than the compost pile I have no other use for them. Anything that comes from these cloned plants is just gravy.

In other words. I’d be a sucker to not at least give cloning tomato plants a shot.

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