Removing old tomato leaves?
 Read all about it here.
How remove old tomato leaves?

How remove old tomato leaves?

As tomato plants grow taller, they make new leaves at the top, first 3 leaves and then a cluster.
When the first tomatoes are ripe for harvest, the plant will already have a lot of leaves.
The most important job of leaves is to convert sunlight into energy – the sugars that feed the plant and make the tomatoes grow.
New leaves get the most energy from sunlight, while the lower leaves hardly get any. In fact, worn out leaves just cost the plant energy. That is why it is wise to remove old leaves. I remove them all so that the cluster to be harvested is free of leaves and its tomatoes are clearly visible.

Summer style.

If the summer is very hot and the sun is burning all day on the tomato plants, it may be wise to leave some more leaves on the plant. When the tomatoes are in the full sun they can overheat. They will ripentoo quickly, and won’t taste really good.
Every once in a while it gets so hot in the greenhouse that the tomatoes develop soft spots. Those tomatoes are not tasty and have a short shelf life. That’s why in the summer I keep more leaves hanging on the plants to protect the tomato from the sun. Outdoors, you won’t be bothered by this problem so easily, but still, keeping more leaves in the summer is not really sensible.

Autumn airing.

A greenhouse can become very humid in the autumn. The closer the plants are to each other, the longer the leaves staydamp. (Every spring I sow too much and because I don’t like throwing away young plants, I often put them a bit too close together). Make sure you remove more of the lower leaves but also remove some leaves growing higher on the plant, so that it stays open and airy. If you leave 6 to 7 adult leaves per plant, that will be fine.
The number of leaves that can be removed from a plant differs per variety. Roma cherry tomato varieties have, for example, a very open leaf structure with small leaves, so you hardly need to remove any of their leaves. Other types of tomato have big leaves that grow close together. These plants can get very full so you will have to prune them a lot so that the air can get between the clusters and the plants can dry well in the autumn.
Don’t pick too many leaves from a plant at one time.It scares the plant and it does not like that. Far better is to prune 2 to 3 leaves regularly (like once a week).

How to prune tomato leaves.

I break off the leaves growing on the main stem of the plant.
Use your thumb and forefinger to grab the leaf close to the stem,bend it up and down and the leaf will break off nicely. Breaking it off cleanly is very important, because the wound will heal well and there is the smallest chance of fungal disease.
Breaking the leaf off is a trick that you may not master in one go. I plucked thousands of tomato leaves in my parents’ nursery. Every week, we removed 3 leaves from about 33,000 tomato plants. Believe me, you quickly master the trick. 😉  If you find it hard to break off the leaves by hand, you can also use a vegetable knife or pruning shears to cut the leaves off the stem. Make sure you always cut right along the stem, so that you get a nice flat wound and the chance of fungal infection is small.
Gaby van der Harg


Our grower Gaby

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