Jenniesue, I never can them, they seem to have an "off" taste that I don't like and that gets through the entire batch.

Annie

I only use ones that have little of that condition. Sometimes I get plum tomatoes with no obvious darkening on the outside, but when I cut them open, the insides where the seeds are is all black. It gets tossed. If I can cut away most of the black area, and there is nice ripe tomato left, it doesn't seem to affect the taste of the rest of it. To help reduce the problem beforehand, I added some calcium carbonate to my planting holes when I planted the tomato plants, as well as sprinkling some of it on the soil surface. If we had a really hot summer (not this year!), the plum tomatoes would grow too fast and that would be a common problem. To help reduce it, I would spray the foliage early on, at the time they just start to blossom. The spray is calcium chloride diluted with water. They sell this product and its helped to save a lot of my very suseptable long thin pointed plum type tomatoes.. This year, not one single tomato has any of this yet, but they are all still quite green, so its not evident as much right now.