Question 1

What is the difference between determinate and indeterminate tomatoes?

Accepted Answer

**Determinate** tomatoes are bush types that grow to a fixed size and stop. **Indeterminate** types are vines that keep growing until frost or you stop them. The difference decides how you grow, support and prune them, and choosing the wrong management for your variety is a very common mistake.

**Determinate (bush).** The stem ends in a flower truss, which terminates growth — hence the name. Typically reaching 60cm to 1.2m. They set most of their fruit in a **concentrated period**, ripening over a few weeks, then largely finish.

**How to grow them:** minimal support, often just a stake or cage. **Do not remove side shoots** — that is the crucial point. Pinching out sideshoots on a determinate plant removes a large share of its fruiting capacity, because the plant has a fixed number of trusses. They suit containers, hanging baskets, small spaces, and anyone wanting a large batch at once for sauce, passata or preserving.

**Indeterminate (cordon or vine).** The growing tip keeps producing leaves and trusses indefinitely, reaching two metres or considerably more in a greenhouse. Fruit ripens **progressively** over a long season.

**How to grow them:** train up a string, cane or wire, and **remove side shoots** — the growths appearing in the leaf axils between the main stem and a leaf — to keep a single stem. Left alone they become an enormous tangle with poor air circulation and small fruit. Pinch out the growing tip once you have as many trusses as your season will ripen, typically four to six outdoors in a cool climate.

**Semi-determinate** types exist and sit between the two.

**The packet tells you**, though the terms vary — cordon, vine and indeterminate mean the same thing; bush and determinate mean the same thing.

Question 2

What is pinching out, and which plants need it?

Accepted Answer

Pinching out (or stopping) is removing the growing tip of a shoot, usually with finger and thumb. It is one of the highest-impact things a gardener can do for five seconds of work. Why it works:

Question 3

Why are my tomatoes splitting?

Accepted Answer

Splitting is caused by uneven growth rate, which almost always traces back to inconsistent water. The skin sets at a certain size; if the flesh inside then expands faster than the skin can stretch,

Question 4

What does pruning actually do to a plant?

Accepted Answer

It redirects growth rather than simply removing material — and understanding the mechanism is what turns pruning from guesswork into something predictable. The central principle: apical dominance.

Question 5

What is a rootstock and why does it matter for fruit trees?

Accepted Answer

A rootstock is the root system a fruit tree is grafted onto. The scion — the variety you actually want, such as a Cox or a Bramley — is joined to it, and the rootstock determines much of how the tree

Question 6

What do the NPK numbers on fertiliser mean?

Accepted Answer

They are the percentages by weight of the three nutrients plants need in the largest quantities: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K), always in that order. A fertiliser labelled 10-5-5

Question 7

What actually makes cut flowers last longer?

Accepted Answer

Three things kill cut flowers, and each has a straightforward countermeasure — most of the folk remedies address only one of them, which is why they help a little and no more. The three causes of

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