Giving Tomatoes Room to Breathe

When the summer heat wears off for the day, I get a lot of peace from trimming tomatoes. It has that Mr. Miyagi feel to it, like when he is trimming Bonsai trees in The Karate Kid. However, trimming tomatoes just isn't for relaxing, tomatoes tend to be a plant that bush out quickly, and it does a lot of good to prune them back.

These tomatoes pretty bushy, and if you look closely, you can see that the leaves are starting to yellow at the bottom.

I took quite a few leaves off of them!

Either they needed a lot of trimming, or I just needed a lot of peace...ha!

These are healthy and vibrant tomatoes from our 2016 garden.

If you take a close look at those tomatoes, you can see they aren't quite as healthy and vibrant as they seemed to be. The leaves are starting to get diseased because they are so thick and bushy that they don't have "room to breathe", or as most gardeners would say, they don't have enough air circulation. If they aren't taken care of, the plant can go from looking vibrant to shriveled in a matter of days.

Freshly trimmed tomatoes may look a little bare, but the extra air circulation from the pruned plants will produce a gorgeous, disease free crop of tomatoes.

When I'm trimming tomatoes, I can't help but think of my own life and how much my family and I need room to breathe. I tend to be a volunteer-for-everything type of person, and before I know it, our lives are a tangled mess of too many activities, and we can go from thriving to barely surviving pretty quickly.

You'd think trimming out activities would make life feel pretty bare, but it opens up space and growth for important things, like building memories in the backyard, catching fireflies and playing Frisbee. Trimming back for us means standing around the grill, savoring the smell of smoky chicken and telling stories, or sitting on the old swing watching the sun go down. Abundance in life doesn't necessarily come from filling every nook and cranny with activities, but from being able to savor the things that truly matter, and sometimes to truly enjoy those things, you've got to be willing to trim some things out and give yourself a chance to breathe.