Kelly,

I think you can add coffee grounds directly to your garden beds if you want to, but I always compost everything first so I have a more well-balanced form of nutrition spread consistently throughout the entire garden. Otherwise, it is hard for me to remember which bed had which kind of soil amendments added. (It would take me a year of sprinkling used coffee grounds daily in a thin layer on each bed to get all the beds done.) If I treat all the beds the same with compost added yearly, I don't have to worry about which bed had 'this' or 'that' added to it or when.

Slow ripening of fruit can be caused by many factors, including the DTM of the varieties being grown, the weather, etc. Flavor of tomatoes is the same way with some being more strongly acidic than others. However, the soil the plants are grown in does have an influence on flavor or lack of such, although what we know about that comes from anecdotal reports. It is hard to research "flavor" since everyone's taste buds experience flavors differently.

I grow about 140 tomato plants every year and my goal is to give all of them good healthy soil that is rich in organic matter from compost, has a little organic fertilizer added (Tomato Tone added to soil at planting time and used as a top dressing throughout the season) and does not have excess nitrogen.

If your tomatoes seemed to be ripening more slowly than the same exact variety in other beds in the community garden, my best guess is your particular plot could have had a shortage of boron, which can cause a form of slow, blotchy, uneven ripening or maybe a potassium deficiency, which also causes slow, blotchy ripening.

Tomatoes also are slower to ripen in cooler temperatures or if the plants and fruit are too shaded, which can result from excess nitrogen.

Most tomatoes ripen on their own timetable, and not ours, so they seem 'slow' to us, but likely are doing just fine by their own standards.

Tomatoes ripen more quickly indoors than outside, so as soon as your tomatoes show a blush of pink (or yellow or purple or whatever their ultimate ripe color will be), you can pick them and set them inside on a table or counter out of direct sunlight and they'll ripen more quickly indoors than they would outdoors. Harvesting home-grown tomatoes at the breaker stage does not adversely affect the flavor or quality of the fruit.

I've linked a chart below that shows the stages of color change tomatoes go through. You can pick any time after the breaker stage with no adverse effect on eventual ripe color, flavor or texture. The advantages of picking at the breaker stage is that the fruit ripens more quickly indoors, you lose fewer fruits to pecking birds and insects, you see less stinkbug damage and you relieve some of the load the plant is carrying which frees it to go bloom and set more fruit.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Tomato Color Change Chart

that is great harvest info, Dawn! Exactly what I need to hear!

And I also compost my coffee grounds before adding to soil, but I am new at vegetable gardening and have a lot of beds to try and feed evenly as well. (Not as many as Dawn! Thank goodness! 140 plants! Do you sell the harvest?) I only want about ten plants this year.

Newhippie, I never have sold a tomato in my life, but I give them away when I have extra. I also give away a couple hundred tomato plants every year.

I grow a lot of tomatoes because we really like them and we like them in all colors (black, purple, green-when-ripe, yellow, orange, pink and red and some that are bicolors are tricolors), shapes and sizes.

We eat all that we can manage to eat fresh, and with the rest I either dehydrate them (we put up several gallons of raisin-sized dehydrated bite-sized tomatoes most years), can them (as canned tomatoes, sauce and salsa....about 120 jars of salsa last year), roast them and freeze or can the roasted ones, freeze them unprocessed to use for cooking, etc. While 140 plants sounds like a lot, many of them are heirlooms that produce significantly fewer tomatoes per plant, although the fruit they produce are far superior in flavor to the heavier-bearing hybrids.

I send a lot of tomatoes to work with my DH and often send them to work with our adult son. He's a firefighter and they work 24-hour shifts and cook at the station, so I send them home-grown produce as often as I can. If they can't fit the home-grown tomatoes into their schedule (maybe the tomatoes don't go with the meal they've prepared, or they're so busy that day they end up eating fast food), then some of the firefighters take them home.

I never have any problem giving away "extra" tomatoes, but since one canning batch can take 20 to 24 lbs. of tomatoes in some cases, I don't have as many extras as you might think.

Everyone we know gets home-canned salsa, peppers, jams and jellies, and that requires that I grow tons of tomatoes and peppers, among other things. Last year I canned over 700 jars of edible products.

So many people begged for tomatoes last year that I dropped some lower-producing heirlooms and am growing a lot more hybrids to try to meet the "demand". I give away the hybrids a lot, but am very picky about who I give heirlooms to, and I don't give away very many of them.

It is my goal to eat fresh tomatoes from April through December. Last year we harvested our first fresh one in April and ate our last home-grown and harvested cherry tomatoes early in February 2011. They had to sit on the counter and ripen for a couple of weeks after bitter cold temps killed the last tomato plants I still had alive in pots in the garage.

This year we're right on track. I have 8 plants in containers that I've been growing since mid-February from plants purchased in 5 or 6" peat pots. All but one has set fruit (that one broke at transplant time and I rooted the top of it, so it is behind the others and just started to bloom) and the largest fruit is about the sizeof an extra-large hen's egg. I think the cherry tomatoes will ripen first though. Either way, I expect the first fruit about the third week in April.

Growing tomatoes is my hobby....or maybe it would be better described as an obsession.

Lots of families here in rural to semi-rural parts of Love County that have members who are avid gardeners plant 100-200 plants or more every year so they have all they want for canning and fresh eating too. One year one of those families called to see if I wanted their "extra" tomatoes because they were tired of dealing with them. I actually told them no because I had too many of my own. It isn't often I'll turn down tomatoes, but all of us had a great year that year and had too many tomatoes.

During a time when I was experimenting with many kinds of tomatoes to see which ones produced best here and had the best flavor, I grew over 400 plants....but a lot of them were outside the actual fenced garden. After the deer found those plants, I had to cut back to 200 or less plants per year.

The year our house was being built, I put in a tiny garden with three tomato plants and put a barbed wire fence around it. Amazingly, none of the wild animals bothered it and I got tomatoes from it even though we were up here only on weekends. This is our 13th year here and it is hard to even remember the time when I thought 3 plants was adequate!

Dawn

Wow, well, when I get overwhelmed with all the work I am bringing on myself in my quest to live some version of a homestead lifestyle, I will remember you and your 700 canning jars! Lord, I respect your hobby/obsession. What lucky family and friends and firefighters you have!
I had heirlooms last year and just don't want to try anything else since we've tasted them now. I didn't realize they produced fewer, so that info helps.

There are some heirlooms that produce almost as well as hybrids, but not many or at least not in our ultra-hot and often drought-challenged climate.

A lot of my favorite heirlooms, taste-wise, are the ones that produce big huge tomatoes. Unfortunately, the heat shuts down production on those pretty early.

I plant a carefully selected mix of tomatoes in all shapes and sizes, so that no matter what in the world the weather does, I get tomatoes.

Ironically, one of my best years was the drought year of 2003 when Love County had about 50% of its annual rainfall. We average 38" (at the western end of the county) to 42" (at the eastern end of the county) of rain a year, but had less than 19" that entire year. We had ultra-low humidity and I had tons of fruit setting, even in August when heat/humidity normally often impedes pollination/fertilization, esp. of large-fruited varieties. I had Brandywine set fruit all summer (which hasn't happened here since then) and Big Boy set gazillions of tomatoes in August when the temps were exceeding 100. The difference that year? Low, low, low humidity. So, I can say that tomatoes set poorly in the heat, and I can say that heirlooms produce less well than hybrids in general, and both statements are true at times, but every now and then you get a year like 2003 when a change in your conditions gives you different results than you'd normally expect. That's one reason gardening is never dull.

Dawn

Thanks for the great info Dawn. I'm going to buy a bag or two of the Tomato Tone. I'm currently growing Brandywines and Jelly Beans Cherry tomatoes. I'm looking forward to whatever lovely tomato plant you can spare for me at the swap. Incidentally, I've never eaten a Brandywine tomato before. Does it really taste all that much better than, say, a vine-ripened homegrown hybrid tomato? I'm betting it does, but am interested in how you would describe its taste.

A good Brandywine that was grown properly, meaning not given excess moisture because excess moisture waters down the flavor of all tomatos, is at least 1,000 times better than any hybrid I've ever grown, and I've grown probably 700 or 800 varieties of tomatoes, and probably at least a third of those were hybrids.

I've never had another tomato come close to Brandywine's superior flavor. I don't know why. There are some that I like almost as well, including some of Keith Mueller's Brandywine crosses and Burpee's Brandy Boy. Some of the black tomatoes, like Black Krim, Carbon, Black From Tula and True Black Brandywine are also excellent, but nothing else is exactly as good as a Brandywine Sudduth's. Among hybrids, some of the ones I think have the best flavor are Big Beef and Beefmaster, and I love Big Boy because my dad grew it every single year.

I always say that the flavors of the various heirloom tomatoes are like different wine vintages and each is special in its own way. Brandywine has a complexity of flavors I find hard to describe in words, but if you can imagine the best wine you've ever had...one that had subtle nuances of flavor that delighted your taste buds---that's Brandywine. I really like True Black Brandywine and I've never met a black tomato I didn't like, but even TBB is not as good as Brandywine Sudduth's.

Flavor is very subjective though, and everyone's taste buds perceive flavor differently so someone else might taste a slice of the same exact Brandywine tomato I thought was the best tomato in the world and they might not like it at all. However, based on my experience in occasionally giving away Brandywine tomatoes to close friends, I'd say every single person we've ever given a Brandywine to has come back and told us it was the best tomato they've ever eaten in their entire lives. The only other tomatoes to elicit that same kind of univesally favorable response are Black Krim, Black From Tula, Cherokee Purple and Carbon.

My good gardening friend, Fred (who I think turns 90 on his next birthday), so enjoyed the black tomatoes that I gave him that it hurt his feelings if I gave black tomatoes to anyone else in the neighborhood. He wanted me to give them only to him. I had plenty so share though so gave them to other folks as well, but had to reassure him that I had enough for everyone. I don't think I've ever given anyone here in the neighborhood a Brandywine, and I don't even grow it most years. As wonderful as the flavor is, they don't produce enough fruit per plant (I'm lucky to get 6 tomatoes from one plant in an average year) to make them worth growing here.