Growth Stage: Removing the Suckers
There are a lot of definitions for word “sucker”, but in this case we are talking about a tobacco sucker. In this pic you can see two small leaves or “suckers” growing from the main stalk of the plant. After a plant is topped, where we break the flower off the plant, new shoots of leaves will start to emerge from base of each leaf where it joins the stalk of the plant. If allowed to grow, these suckers will eventually turn the plant into a bush, with small, undesirable leaves. So throughout the harvest, we are constantly checking for suckers and removing the larger ones by hand and applying an organic “suckercide” to each and every plant to prevent new ones from growing. Each tobacco plant will produce up to three sets of suckers at each leaf, so this is a very labor intensive process.
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