A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2006 prune tomatoes?

I am supposed to prune tomatoes? I recently sprayed my plants with an organic spray - they are infested with tiny spider mite looking critters, and the day after I sprayed the leaves were turning brown. Today the leaves were dead, so I trimmed them off. Is this ok?? I have tomatoes on all varieties of plant at this point, and they look good, just the leaves are struggling.
Thanks!

It is purely personal choice as to whether or not to prune the suckers. I have normally removed the suckers to keep the plant with one central leader which makes it easier to stake the plants. This year I have many cages that I built and will not sucker the plants I use cages on. What is this "organic" spray you used?

You can tell if you have spider mites if you hold a sheet of white paper under the leaves and tap the leaves. If there are tiny red critters crawling around, they're probably spider mites.
If the leaves are totally eaten up, I would clip them and drop them in soapy water. If there is still some surface area of the leaves, and most of the leaves are infested, I'd spray...but find out exactly what you have, and use the most appropriate spray. Brown leaves, or dying leaves, could be caused by many things, including spraying the wrong product at the wrong time of day.

well i guess they are not spider mites, they are white-ish colored with a fat body. Luckily i have tons of ladybugs that have also taken up residence on those plants, so hopefully they'll chow down.

The spray I used is called "veggie farm", its from a small local nursery and contains things like garlic oil, sodium bicarbonate, etc... it says on the bottle it may brown the leaves, but that it won't hurt the plant.

Well, they look better today so I guess they'll live. I'll try and post a picture later. Thanks!