How Many Tomatoes Can You Get From One Plant?

Today we're going to talk all about tomato plants and how you can get more tomatoes from your plants and how many tomatoes you can expect to get from your plants in the first place. Let's do it.

Sweet Pickings

I am going to be harvesting from my tomato arch today. So I've got four plants on this arch. If you have not seen my series all about setting up the arch, you can check it out all over the Gardenary YouTube channel. I walk you through which plants I put in here and how to set it up. So I have Sungold tomatoes which are probably the most prolific. I've got some grape tomato plants which are Juliets as well as one plant that's not actually a Juliet (because they were out), but it's similar. I've got four cherry tomato plants all planted on this one arch trellis and I've been harvesting from this trellis now for probably almost a month. We'll continue to harvest from these for at least, I would say, another month with good heavy harvest and then it’ll probably slow down the beginning of September. So these plants went into the ground at the end of May. They were started indoors and grown in like a greenhouse for more than a month indoors. So lots of time to get to tomatoes. This is what we call a long and lengthy plant, meaning they take a lot of space and a lot of time but the results are super sweet.

How many tomatoes can you get from one plant?

If you search the internet and you ask the internet to tell you how many tomatoes you can expect to get from one tomato plant, you're going to get a wide variety of opinions. Most times when you Google that, you are going to find numbers for large tomatoes rather than the cherry and grape varieties. One of the reasons why I love growing grape and cherry varieties is because I get more. They are smaller, but I get to harvest them more often. Plus, I can come in here for snacks! If you've been following my story, you know that I prefer to be in the garden rather than the kitchen. So, I'm not one to be making tons of tomato sauces or salsas and I’m not much into jarring and canning. While that may not really be my thing, it may be yours! For that reason though, I love snacking type foods from the garden. One article I read said that you could get over 200 tomatoes from one tomato plant. When they tell you things like that, they often have a method to get more tomatoes. Another article I read said you could get 10 to 20 tomatoes per plant. So we're talking about a ten times difference between these two articles.

From a large tomato plant, depending on the growth and the way the tomatoes form on the plant, you could get up to 20 or 30 large tomatoes off of a really strong healthy indeterminate tomato plant when growing the larger varieties. For smaller tomato varieties, you could definitely get several hundred cherry tomatoes off of one vine in a given season.

Tips for Tons of Tomatoes

So, how can you get more tomatoes from the plants that you're growing? 

• Raised beds + Great Soil The first thing you want to do is have a really healthy setup for your plants. So growing them in raised beds is going to make a huge difference because you're going to get to have them be in the healthiest situation possible and they're going to have room for the roots to grow down. A general thing to understand about your plants is however much growth you see above the ground, that kind of growth is happening below the ground as well. So when you have a plant that needs a ton of space above the dirt, then that means it needs a lot of space below the dirt, too. That's why we use raised beds with tomato plants because they have such large root systems and they love to spread out and grow underneath as well. So, the first tip to get more tomatoes from your plant is to grow them in raised beds with great soil.
• Feed Them Often The second thing that I recommend doing for your tomato plants is feeding them. Most Nightshade plants, including tomatoes, are known as heavy feeders, which means the plants take up a lot of nutrients often. I learned from another gardener that every time your plant is doing something new, you should feed it. “Doing something new” would be things like: starting to flower, starting to fruit, or growing new vines. So each time I see my tomato plant “doing something new,” then it's time for me to come in and give it a little bit of extra food. So you can do that based on what's growing on your plant at that moment. If it's fruiting or flowering, you want to be giving it a phosphorus-rich fertilizer to make these fruit form even better and faster. You could also add more compost to the base of the plant 
• Prune The third thing to do to get more tomatoes from your plants is to prune. So pruning, I like to say, is a way of talking to your plants. It's a way to tell your plants, “I want less of this and more of that, please.” So, when you prune your plants, especially when you're pruning non-fruiting branches, you tell your plants, “Hey, I don't want any more non-fruiting branches, I want fruit.” Oftentimes, your plants will really listen. I try to prune once a week during the growing period of my tomato plants. 

Just like we talked about giving them what they need when they need it when they're doing something new. So I’ll put maybe some new compost or some new fertilizer at the base of the plant, water it in really well, and prune away some of the non-fruiting branches. That way I'm telling my plant, “Hey, I want more fruit and less leaves.” And that is essential for getting more fruit out of your plant. 

Plants in Optimal Conditions Love to Thrive

I like to say that plants that are growing in optimal conditions love to thrive. They literally will take over a space if they have optimal conditions to grow in. So if your tomatoes are growing in an optimal condition, that's the way you're going to get the most fruit from them, but that doesn't mean it'll actually be growth that you want. I have had years, I tell this story in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, I've had years where I get tons of growth and the tomato plants were huge,

but there was little to no fruit on them. I had tons of leaves and very little fruit and that was because I wasn't pruning them. The year that I learned to prune my tomatoes was the year that I started getting way more fruit per plant.

The Real Tomato Math

I harvested around 60 or so tomatoes from my vines and I probably pick this many off of four plants every five days. So if I'm getting, let's say I just get to do that for a month, alright? So for every five days, I'd get six harvests of about 60 Tomatoes each. So that's about 400 tomatoes. So I think I'm being kind of conservative there. So 400 tomatoes off of four plants. So that would be a hundred tomatoes per plant. What do you think? Do you believe that kind of math? So it comes up somewhere in between those two extreme numbers of 10 per plant and 200 per plant. I would say a safe bet, if you grow tomatoes the way I do, is that you're going to get at least a hundred tomatoes off of your plants within four to five weeks when you're in the middle of your harvest and believe me, it tastes really good.

Get Growing

So keep these three things in mind: growing tomatoes in a raised bed, feeding your tomatoes often - at least weekly, and pruning them often as well. That's the way you're going to get very impressive results from your tomato plants. And you'll be picking tomatoes for weeks on end and eating right there in the garden. Thanks for bringing back the kitchen garden with me!