I had the classic garden issue this year of forgetting to pay closer attention to my tomatoes. That, plus being away at times, meant that they flourished with stems and leaves, leaving them very bushy. Impressive, yes, but actually not that fruitful.
To help with the ripening, I took a pair of scissors to them last week and did a hard prune. Anything that didn't have flowers or fruit got chopped. In retrospect it reminds me of John 15 - if there's no fruit it gets cut and thrown into the fire (or for us, the compost heap).
Interestingly, neither the very puny nor the incredibly leafy plants that I wrote about before had any tomatoes on them. The little one makes sense but the big one? It spent all is energy on growing stems and leaves that nothing was left over for fruit. The plant that did the best? Compact and didn't extend too far. It's as if it was focusing on the task at hand and it didn't over reach. Metaphors abound.
