Gardening nonsense question?

[nao57]

So a few years ago there was an idea floating around that you needed to stress your plants out on purpose to help them produce. Like they'd say you purposely use a shovel to damage some (but not all) of your tomato plant roots to make the plant think its time to get ready for... whatever and it would somehow make it focus on making tomatoes instead of making foliage and leaves. This is just one example, but they would circulate this idea also that pruning off the leaves would make it make more tomatoes.

I think this stuff is wrong. I've not seen anything to indicate that it could help. It seems the opposite, that to make a lot of tomatoes, or other vegetables that you need 'BIG infrastructure'.

But I wanted to actually just make sure... Has anyone seen anything about this idea working of stressing out the plants to shake them up? I don't see how it could be true, but I want to make sure I've covered every bread crumb of clues.

Thanks.

 

[Sally PB]

This might be taken from a different idea.

Some plants DO NOT like to have their roots disturbed when they're transplanted from a small pot into the ground in the garden. Curcurbits (cucumbers, squash, and melons, for example) are among this group.

Tomatoes and peppers are different. If you have a ball of roots running around the inside of the pot, it's ok to gently tease the roots out from the ball when planting them in the ground.

Tomato plants can also benefit from having lower leaves removed so that soil born pathogens are less likely to splash up on the leaves. I do this after they're in the ground and have started growing. I also remove the suckers, which are the small stem sprouts that grow between the stem and leaves.

Pruning tomatoes can also help with air flow around the plant, which helps keep disease down.