Once you’ve got a few trusses of green tomatoes on your plants, it’s a good idea to strip off some of the excess foliage. This will help the plants to focus on fruit and ripening.
You can actually cut off most of the leaves once your green tomatoes have formed so you can be quite brutal. The photo above shows how few leaves are left once the plants have been pruned. Use secateurs to remove the leafy stalks, leaving the stalks with trusses of tomatoes to keep on growing. Your plant will look quite bare afterwards, but don’t panic – as long as there are a few leaves and the main stem is intact, they should be fine and this really will help them to ripen while it’s still nice and warm.
Remember to keep pinching out sideshoots that appear and pinch out the growing tip once the plant gets too tall.