Monty strips tomato leaves

[Allan]

On Friday's Gardeners World DW watched Monty Don stripping all the leaves off his tomato plants. Surely without its leaves the tomato plant cannot manufacture the sugars and flavours essential to the best tomatoes.
While on the subject there are now some video clips on the BBC gardening website worth watching, also clips of Geoff Hamilton, Arther Billit, Percy Thrower et al.
Allan

[Chantal]

I always thin my tomato leaves when they get very thick and then strip them beneath the lowest truss, gradually moving up the plant as the tomatoes ripen.

I don't generally watch GW so I didn't see what he did; did he take every one of them off?

[sprout]

Well the evidence seems clear: on the plot, under the mountains of leaves preventing any sun reaching in, grow bright red tomatoes. I don't believe in stripping, do believe it's one of these 'hand me downs' like spraying runner beans or 'de-budding' sweetcorn

With you on this one Allan.

I do strip of lower leaves in the g'house though, just to let the air in, up to the first truss.

[Johnboy]

Hi Sprout,
Without trying to seem pedantic I feel what Chantal is trying to say is this. You allow the bottom truss to receive ventilation and it would also allow more sunlight but when you have picked the first truss the second one becomes the bottom truss and Chantal takes those off and so on until the plant is finished.
That is what I do in the Greenhouse but only shorten the leaves on any I grow outside.
This cutting of leaves I do not believe to be an old wives tale as it is carried out in commercial Tomato houses. Commercial growers do not do anything other than best practice methods. They have to pay somebody to do it and I have my doubts that they will pay out money just for the fun of it.

[Chantal]

Thanks JB, that's exactly what I do.

[Tigger]

And it's exactly what Monty Don was suggesting too. If you saw it through, he was suggesting you started now to let more light and air through, with the intention of getting the greatest quantity if ripened fruits by the end of October/beginning of November.

[Chantal]

Thanks Tigger, my faith in MD is restored.

[Tony Hague]

Commercial tomato growers also untie the tomato plants, and lay them down to that the stripped part of the stem runs horizontally, before the bit with leaves still on heads upwards. That way you can get many more trusses out of a plant without hitting the roof or needing a ladder to pick fruits.
Never seen it done by gardeners though - anyone know otherwise?

[Johnboy]

Hi Tony,
I am a retired nursery owner and although I have never needed to lay tomatoes down here, as you quite rightly say, and if you trace the base of the plant of some of ours, when I was in training,there was as much as 40ft or more from the growing tip. That was many moons ago so what length they achieve now I dread to think.