I guess people say vine ripened is better, but personally I don't find there to be a big difference between them and those that ripen on the windowsill. IMO any tomato is better than no tomato, and when frost threatens I pick them off. Actually, because of tomato blight in 2001-2 I pick off the big ones(started doing that in mid August) and put them in the basement for safe keeping, then I know I'll have tomatoes TO ripen instead of them rotting. Those were two hard, hard years for my family with no salsa! lol
So, it's really up to you whether you want to go to the trouble of covering them up or not. But let's just hope that there's none of that white stuff for at least another month anyway :0)

Laurie

I plan on picking my tomatoes this evening. There have been a few frosts here...but luckily they haven't been hit. No red tomatoes here this year either. :(

Sierra

Thanks Laurie and Sierra! Yes, I will be picking tomatoes very soon then. My SIL will be happy because she has been eye-balling some of them for a few weeks now.... and yes I will share some with her! LOL

We've often covered our tomatoes through one or two frosts, mainly because i didn't want to deal with picking them at that time. But i agree that you might as well just pick them if you have the time to do it. I layer mine between newspapers in cardboard boxes, and try to remember to check them often.

Let's just say that a lot of tomatoes end up in the compost! :)

How generous of you, Ang. LOL! I don't have anyone I have to share with and my family doesn't like tomatoes, even in spag. sauce. Oh well - poor them. Just the more for me. : ) Sound greedy? You bet!

I just was looking at mine and pondering. I might risk a few for the next week and see where that gets us to. But, I have a few 'Supersteak' that are a good 5" or 6" in diameter that I definitely want to eat for a bacon and fried tomato breakfast. I decided to bring them inside to ripen. I'm not sure what to do about my 'Sweet 100'. It has many, many, many fruit on it and I have, so far, picked 3 red ones. Exasperating!!!! But, GOOD NEWS! I found 4 'Cristal' that were ripe on the vine!
Here's a few pics:

The BIG 'Supersteaks'

One big 'mater - This is the one second from left in the 2nd from bottom row from the pict. above

Shauna

Wow Shauna, now that's a tomato! One like that can feed a family of 4 for 2 days! lol Need any onion to go with that breakfast? ;)
Laurie

WOW Shauna! That is HUGE!

I did end up picking all the 'maters today. I've got them inside my little "indoor greenhouse" in front of a south facing window.

Maybe by next week I'll be making a batch of speghetti sauce.... or salsa.... or both! LOL

Just for the fun of it, I weighed those big ones. The biggest one weighed 1 lb. 8 ozs. and the smallest one (the one that is ripening) weighed 11.5 ozs. - Average weight is 1 lb 2 ozs.

I think my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Anyone want to join me for a good english breakfast? LOL! With onions, of course!

Shauna
(Who thinks she'd better learn how to can tomatoes like her mother did.)

I am late to this thread but I hold out as long as I can. I have a frost prone yard and cannot cover yet as there is too much out there, so I use the sprinkler and it has worked so far. Had corn on the cob for the first time today and we have been eating vine ripened tomatoes for a few weeks. Lots left to ripen though, will see how far I can push it.

Great tomatoes Shauna, I have a few larger varieties but not that large, wow.

Shauna I know the feeling on the sweet 100 -- i have 3 palnts and seem to only get 5-6 at a time although they're loaded! Same with my yellow pears, I have 10 plants, get 6-7 at a time and they barely make it in the house!

As for the reds, I've been picking most of mine pink and letting them ripen inside. A couple that got knocked off early never did ripen arg! I've got the sheets ready to go with this weather lately-- I got scared last night when it started clearing after being cold and cloudy all day and it was WAY too late to haul out sheets (11 pm!)

I have one husky gold that finally vine ripened and I WANT them so I'm watching close! Last week I did set the sprinklers one night, and now I'll do sheets more since my new parsley got "wrinkled" one night.

Oh well, here's hoping for more ripening time (note to self- bring in the pots!) At least I want frost-free until my company leaves so I can go out and pick away- I have 25 plants in the garden and a dozen pots! I did get a pretty good harvest yesterday (it'll be in week of sept 4 photos soon)

oops I just realized it's no longer the week of sept 4! I'll get these pics in the puter then post them on a week of sept 11!
sorry!

I leave them as long as possible. But I've noticed my Stupice, which are golf-ball sized, are getting sour. Perhaps shortening days and coolish nights (although not this weekend). So I am watching the big tom@oes carefully but not too worried about the remaining little ones. Joe, Winnipeg ps what a strange summer, eh? I've ripened Habenero peppers but no 'mid' or 'late' season tom@oes.

Last year we had bad weather and the tomatoes did not ripen. I took bucket loads of green ones, washed them in a cold water & bleach solution (10 parts water to 1 part bleach), follwed by a pure cold water rinse and let these dry off on tables layered with paper in the basement. We did not expose these to light. Almost all ripened, with minimal spoilage. Taste was really good too. The bleach part my mum mentioned - it has something to do with helping in the ripening process.

Kashacres, the bleach solution is interesting. The only time I've tried it was when we had 2 years of tomato blight, where the tomatoes just started rotting on the blossom end. I had heard somewhere that washing them in the bleach solution could kill the spores of the blight, but it never did work, they all rotted anyway. :( All I've ever done, is if I wanted them to ripen quicker I'd stick them in a south windowsill. For normal rippening I just stick them in boxes in the basement. I've heard of people putting paper between them, but I've never known why?
Laurie

I should have caved and picked my tomatoes, it is 7.3C and it is only 8:00 p.m. I covered tonight for a change, the ground is so wet already I don't want to run the sprinkler. I hope it doesn't get too low, but it isn't looking good.

Oh how I wish I had habeneros ripening, they are in full flower mode and it is too late, whaaa. The only peppers ripe are paprika peppers but I have oodles of ripe tomatoes.

I am so sick of dealing with turnips and rutabagas, I have so many and they are so huge, had to freeze a lot of corn today too, too much is ripe at once.

I wonder if I should have picked some pumpkins, they can take a light frost... I may be out with a flashlight yet tonight.

Cool -- interesting tip about using bleach! I'll have to keep that in mind.

So far mine are ripening very nicely but it'll be a while before we can enjoy one. I just can't believe how late it is this year.

Well, I caved and picked the lot of them tonight. Of course, I decided to start the process at about 7:00 PM so had to really hustle to get 9 plants stripped while I could still see. Anyway, I got 4 boxes of tomatoes and half a brown grocery bag of sweet 100's (1 plant). I'm pleased, although a few more vine ripened would have been nice. I say this now, of course, but this will be the last time I grow 9 plants. I'm the only one that eats them fresh. My family will only eat them in salsa. So, now I've got tons of salsa to make. I think I will freeze a whole pile and gradually make salsa.

I had 3 plants each of Legend, Cristal and Supersteak. Legend produced the most, Cristal produced the most consistent and largest of those 2 and then the Supersteak are the ones above, which are huge. Of course, the jury is still out on the flavour.

How'd everyone else do?

Shauna

Whatever you do, donÂt stick unripe tomatoes under your bed and forget about them ;)

My great granny, granny and mom use to do this all the time. Pick them just before a frost, layer them in flat wooden boxes with newspaper inbetween, place them under your bed and they will ripen in time.

But again, donÂt forget about them like I did one year. Bad year of fruit flies that winter!

Sharon

Speaking of fruit flies, Lee Valley has some fruit fly traps that they say really work. Raid did not a bad job yesterday, but i haven't opened my compost pail yet this morning! Probably a cloud of them hiding in there. Mosquito coils don't seem to work on them.

I also layer my tomatoes in boxes, but i find a lot of them rot before they ripen, even in the porch where it's cooler. Oh - don't ever try to ripen your tomatoes in a cooler. Bad mistake!

DH suggested last night that we lay them out on several sheets of newspaper on the wire shelves in my indoor greenhouse. That should work.

Why does wrapping them in newspaper work? Is it something to do with the rate of ripening? Slows it down a bit so they all don't ripen at once? It's something form my childhood that I just don't remember why we did it?

Shauna

I'm glad I picked mine when I did! I made a sam-which with them at lunch time. MMMMMM good stuff and juicy too!

I've just got mine laying right on the wire shelving of the indoor greenhouse and they are ripening very nicely.

I'm curious too about wrapping them????

Marcia, do your tomatoes ripen ok other years, or are they just rotting this year? I've only had that happen in 2002-3. In our area there was a huge tomato blight in those years, and that's what mine did too, rot before they ripened. Since then, I've used black plastic in the spring over the soil where I'm planting the tomatoes to fry out any fungus that may be in the soil. Last year I also put straw around my tomatoes so that the soil didn't splash up onto the tomatoes when it rained. Knock on wood the last 2 years have been blight free here.

So far, I've picked 3 1/2- five gallon pails of tomatoes off of 12 plants, and I bet there's another pail or two out there. I've got 6 bush Celebrities and 6 Big Beef and 2 plants of some type of cherry tomato. The Celebrity is always the workhorse in my garden....always the big producer, but Big Beef wasn't too bad either.

We all like fresh tomatoes here, but salsa disapears really quick around here. Last year I made 40 QUARTS of salsa, and as of yesterday, it is all gone! Those tomatoes had better start ripening quicker...

Laurie

It happens lots of years, but it was worse either last year or the year before. I'm sure part of the reason is that i don't check them often enough. The idea about putting them on the indoor greenhouse shelves is a good one, though, and i'm going to do that this year.

The reason i use newspaper is to separate the layers of tomatoes in the boxes - that and the newspaper will absorb liquid from any tomatoes that begin to rot.

We also have black plastic on the bed we use for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and zucchini. We've used it for years. Maybe we did have some kind of blight without knowing it. I don't know.

My tomatoes are still out there - we've been lucky so far. According to my garden journal, the third week of September is usually when we cave in and pick all the tomatoes after covering the plants several times. We haven't had to cover yet this year!

Another reason for covering is that ripening fruit produces a gas called ethylene, which in turn causes ripening. Covering keeps the gas in and quickens ripening.

I like to can all my tomatoes (for this reason I grow Romas) and I need them all ripe at the same time, so red ones go in the fridge to wait for the slowpokes, then the greens I put on trays covered with paper, and in the centre of each tray I place one quite ripe (but not rotten) apple. Apples give off a lot of ethylene and wow do the tomatoes ripen in a few days.

Tomato flavour is not optimized by refrigeration or picking green but for my canning purposes it is necessary.

I might have a bad canning year this year, as one Roma plant I bought turned out to be a Sweet Millions and I have Millions of green marbles instead of Romas. And my actual Romas have been heavily sampled by slugs. For this reason as well I have been picking them quite green this year.

Oh I also meant to say Laurie, Blossom End Rot (assuming that is exactly what went wrong with your maters) is a physiological disorder and not a blight or disease. It is caused by calcium deficiency.

The link below gives a good summary.

I used to lose a lot of tomatoes to BER also, but have not seen it since I have been using Miracle Gro for Tomatoes. Must keep the soil levels of stuff right for calcium uptake.

Here is a link that might be useful: Blossom End Rot

Well, I think I remember them calling it a blight,can't remember if it was the early or late blight, but it affected tomato crops throughout MB and I believe possibly farther out too. It was all over the local news, and the 'experts' claimed that it was a soil borne bacteria that splashed up onto the plants from either rain or irrigation. They claimed only sterilization of the soil and crop rotation would alleviate the problem. I'm assuming that the growth of the bacteria or fungus initially was due to having the right type of weather conditions in the spring/early summer. Whatever the cause, this is the reason why I pick my maters as soon as they are a decent size....I'm not taking any chances :^).

I've also heard about calcium benefiting tomatoes. So from somewhere, I heard to throw out all your eggshells into the garden and work them in and they release their calcium into the soil. I've also used crushed eggshells to sprinkle around hostas to prevent slugs.

I too, gave my tomatoes a couple of hits of Miracle Gro during the season and this year used Myke when planting. The plants ended up being a really good size.....and produced a decent amount of fruit too.

Laurie

Here is a link that might be useful: tomato diseases

Just picked my tomatoes today. It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the 60's... But alas, I am leaving for two weeks and I am sure that we will have frost by the time I return. I filled two boxes of green and pink tomatoes and covered them with paper. I will leave them in the garage, and hopefully when I get back in Oct, most will be ripe :)

Laurie there must have been a blight too, I just thought what you described sounded like blossom end rot. I didn't hear about the blight in Wpg. But the summer of 03 was terrible for BER for me.

Here are the results from my harvest (click for a bigger picture):