You know you will need to be pruning tomatoes plants to refrain ending up with overgrown tomato plants, so it is helpful to realize that you will do different things at different stages of the growing season. You can easily define three separate stages, apiece with their own tomato gardening tips to follow and adjust your efforts to match. You will find everyone has their own views on this, so reading about common tomato gardening problems will be helpful. this article however is based more on experiences and not as much what the textbook has to say.
When the plants are first growing, all of your pruning tomatoes efforts will focus on the new leaves and the new growth shoots that are between the trunk and leaves. At this point you only want one main trunk so that it can grow massive and sturdy. What you do is snip off the leaves that are closest to the ground as new ones form above them. Then by eliminating the side shoots, all the energy will be directed to the newly formed tomato and not the leaves. This lets the tomatoes grow larger. Once your tomato plant gets as high as the stakes or to the top of the cage, your strategies will start to change.
Tomato plants at this size become more difficult to keep up. What you will do is turn things around and let the new shoots form and cut off new growth at the top. With this tomato gardening tip you keep the same principal, but in reverse. You will get a bushier plant, but it will not outgrow your stakes or cage. You can pinch back some of the new growth, but let some of them grow out. Keep pulling unnecessary leaves off, but be aware that this is the hot time of the summer and the ground and the tomatoes need the shade the leaf provides. Your goal is to still channel the nutrients to the tomatoes and not the foliage.
There is a point of no return, and you just have to grappling that you have overgrown tomatoes. You will have to admit that you also have tomato gardening problems. One of the pruning tomato tips to use at this point is to count 30 days ahead. If that is within the time you usually have left before the first frost, then you can stop letting new tomatoes form, and just cut them off along with all new shoots and a pile of leaves Only pay attention to making sure the tomatoes already there can finish growing.
Do the ideal you can for as long as you can is some of the most practical tomato gardening tips and advice there is when dealing with overgrown tomato plants. You could really apply that advice to other tomato gardening problems like your fungus and pest issues, too. Everyone really needs to think about being sure not to overdo it by putting in more plants than you need in the spring!