Tomatoes love and need the warmth to ripen up, but autumn is on the way, and the nighttime temperatures are dropping. Will your tomatoes ripen in time?

Here are 5 tips to speed up that process

  1. Feed those plants!
    Just like your muscles need fuel to grow, and like your body needs to take in energy in the form of calories to expend energy, more inputs to your plants will result in greater outputs. In other words, dosing your plants with a liquid tomato feed will boost your plants’ growth and ripening.
    Tomatoes like a feed that’s relatively high in potassium, as this nutrient encourages fruit formation and ripening.
    Feed at least every two weeks.
  2. Vine-ripened tomatoes have the best flavour, so if you are growing yours in a greenhouse, or tunnel, shut the windows before the temperature drops in the evenings to trap in that warmth.
    If you put up shadecloth to protect the plants from the hottesest part of the summer, you can remove it to start collecting more warmth.
  3. Pinch off flowers 6-8 weeks before your first expected frost date.
    Tomatoes can take up to 2 months to grow from flower to ripened fruit, so flowers that set now won’t have time to fully ripen in time. Removing them will allow the plant to put its energy into forming and ripening the fruit that has already started forming.
    For indeterminate varieties (vining), pinch off the top of the vines as well as the side shoots for the same reasoning as you pinched off the flowers.
  4. Bring them inside.
    When the daylength shortens, and temperatures drop below 13C (55F) for most of the time, your tomatoes are not going to do much more ripening. It’s time to harvest them from the vines and bring them inside to finish ripening. Here are some indoor ripening tips.
    Sort the tomatoes by how much colour they have into 3 piles: Almost fully ripe, light green & pale starting to turn colour, and dark green.
    The light green/pale ones are likely to ripen as they have started to emit ethylene gas, a plant hormone that promotes various processes such as growth and ripening. A warm place will help them ripen. You can place a banana or apple with your tomatoes to speed up the production of ethylene, and therefore the ripening. Enclosing them in a paper bag will also help trap more ethylene gas in, while still allowing good air exchange (avoid using a plastic bag).
    Check on them daily to remove any ripe or just about ripe ones.
    Don’t store ripening tomaotes in the fridge as this will greatly slow down ripening. Warmth is your friend even more than light at this stage.

    For those darker green ones that aren’t likely to ripen, it’s time to pull out those green tomato recipes!