Pruning Currant Tomatoes

[Setec Astronomy]

I have a small container which wants to fall over with the overhanging weight of an indeterminate plant, so this year, instead of doing something smart like planting a determinate in there, I decided to plant a Sweet Pea Currant, thinking it wouldn't be so heavy.

Now that I've got it growing, it's very sprawly, I was wondering if anyone prunes these currants to single or double stem, or whether you just let them grow into a bush.

[fluffy_gumbo]

My Solanum spontaneum is in the ground but I gave up pruning it a while back because the suckers are harder to identify than in bigger tomato plants. It's now a bushy 3-feet-tall plant that's somewhat tied up to 2 stakes as the main branched in a Y shape. With that said, I haven't tied it up anymore since last month because all the new branches are pretty light and doesn't fall over.

[Setec Astronomy]

That was part of my problem, I'm just learning to properly prune indeterminates, in fact I just yesterday did my first pruning to the "strong Y", so I looked at the currant and it didn't look anything like the ones I just pruned. I'll wait until it gets a little bigger and see if I can figure it out. I need to study my ground cherries too, I had started a separate thread about that.

[Setec Astronomy]

Well, this plant got big enough so I was able to figure it out, it branches more like a ground cherry than my other tomatoes. I mostly decided to prune it to 4 leaders, because those 4 are pretty well developed. But as I went to prune the suckers off those 4 leaders, because I waited so long, they are large and have flowers...and now I don't know what to do. As Fluffy_gumbo noted above, the stem diameter is small and the fruit will be small so this plant is unlikely to be heavy, however, it could be an unruly mess.

Does anyone else have any insight?

[bower]

How are you supporting the plant? If it's in a cage, you can anchor the cage to a wall or something, with garden wire. I do this all the time and is a necessary save.
It's a fact that once you let a sucker get blossoms, it becomes harder to prune it off. The road to unruliness is paved with unintended blossoms.
One option is to Missouri prune after the first leaf above the first or second cluster. Always leave the leaf above it, I'm told.
The downside is that you will likely get a new sucker growing out of the end, so be sure of the point where you want to terminate that growth as you will have to do it more than once.
Ultimately I believe currants like cherries are unruly by nature and support their unruliness pretty well due to the small fruit size.
So simply anchoring the cage to something sturdy may be the best option.

[Setec Astronomy]

IMG_2445.JPG

Well, it's in a planter I am not too fond of. I keep trying to plant something small in it. Last year I planted a Sweet Aperitif, which got about 8' long, and heeled the whole support beam of the planter over (it has several more sections which aren't attached right now). I had to lash it to my deck railing to keep from falling over by itself, forget any wind. Of course that's before I understood or implemented any kind of pruning to reduce the number of leaders (as an aside, I'm growing a couple of Sweet Aperitif in other planters this year, pruned to 2 leaders, and maybe it's my imagination but they seem much thicker than last year, when they seemed more vine-ey).

Seeing how thin the stems are and how small the fruit is going to be on this Sweet Pea Currant, it may be that the planter will be fine with it. I'll have to think on it some more or just man up and cut off those suckers.

[slugworth]

give it a covid haircut.

[Setec Astronomy]

give it a covid haircut.

Well, I did. I got it down to (ahem) 8 stems:

IMG_2476.JPG