Harvesting Tomatoes

Depending on which variety you are growing, you can expect to begin harvesting your tomatoes 55 to 100 days from the day you set them out in the garden. The small cherry tomatoes tend to ripen the fastest while the big slicing tomatoes take longer typically. (Check the seed packet for the number of days to harvest, and for what color your tomatoes will be when ripe.)

Commercial (supermarket) tomato harvesting goes something like this:

Pole-grown (indeterminate-type), fresh-market tomatoes are harvested when fruit is not quite pink in color (a long way from ripe). Bush-grown (determinate-type) tomatoes are harvested when about 15 percent of the fruit is red, that means that 85 percent of the fruit is still far from ripe. The tomatoes are then sorted and packed into cartons. The cartons of fruit are typically placed in temperature-controlled storage for up to 10 days and are subjected to an ethylene treatment (to "ripen" them) prior to going to market.

Harvesting in the garden goes something like this:

It's a Saturday in June and you're making a sandwich for lunch and need a slice of tomato. You go out to your garden and pick the reddest slicing tomato out there.

Later, you're making a dinner salad and need some cherry tomatoes and some yellow pear tomatoes and some purple Cherokee tomatoes to go with what was left of the slicing tomato you used at lunch (provided there was any left after you ate a slice or two with a sprinkle of salt). You go out to your garden and you pick handfuls of the ripest, yummiest cherries, yellow pears, and purple Cherokees out there (you pick a few extra to eat on the way back to the house).

Pick your tomatoes when they are red (or whatever color they are supposed to be) and firm. Those you don't eat fresh off the vine can be stored in a cool place (optimally 60°F) -- that is, not in the refrigerator and not in a plastic bag.

If, on that rare occasion in the winter, frost threatens and there are a dozen or so still-green tomatoes on the vine, go ahead and pick them, wrap them loosely in newspaper or a brown paper bag (not plastic!) and store them in a cool, dark, dry place. Better: fry them up at once! Fried green tomatoes take the sting out of having to pull up your tomato plants.