Yay!!!

Sorie, Yay! Hooray! Congrats on the harvest! Many people pick at the first blush. It is the best way to ensure the critters (squirrels, rabbits, turtles, tomato hornworms and fruitworms, birds, etc.) get fewer fruit and y'all get more.

Also, in our hot climate, the heat can actually interfere in ripening and cause fruit to ripen slowly, so when you pick them at first blush and carry them indoors, they actually will finish ripening more quickly indoors off the vine than they would outdoors on the vine.

There's nothing worse than leaving fruit to ripen on the plant and having a hail storm roll in and ruin every tomato on every plant.

So, I feel like there's lots of reasons to pick fruit as soon as the color breaks.

Another one? If you have fruit that has broken color and rain is in forecast, you want to pick the ones that have broken color so that the rain won't cause them to crack or split.

Finally, stink bugs will attack even green fruit, but by picking the fruit and getting it inside, you are lessening the amount of cloudy spot you'll find on your fruit from the stinkbugs.

We likely won't get any heavy rainfall here for a couple more days but I do have a lot of fruit just starting to break color and I will take a break from canning this evening to go out there and get all those tomatoes picked so they aren't left out there to deal with whatever the rainstorms bring.

I've been picking tomatoes daily but skipped picking them this morning so I could focus on making plum jelly and plum jam. I'm trying really hard to stay caught up on them because about the same time the plums finish ripening, the peaches begin to ripen. I can freeze tomatoes and make salsa later, but I like to process the peaches and plums while they are fresh. I could extract fruit juice for jelly and fruit pulp for jam and freeze them, but once you've done all the extraction, it is just a few more steps to finish making them into jelly or jam. So, at our house this week, the plums are getting all the attention while tomatoes in various stages of ripening sit around on every available flat surface.

I hope y'all enjoy every yummy bite of your beautiful tomatoes. My worst pest isn't hornworms or fruitworms----it is turtles. Then come into the garden at night, climb up into the raised beds and chomp away at low-hanging fruit. Every now and then one of them who is attempting to climb up into a raised bed falls backwards and lands upside down in the pathway where it lies there until I come out in the morning and flip it over. I try to check for them every single morning so no poor turtle has to lie on the ground out there roasting in the sunshine all day long. Before we moved here I never would have guessed our most persistent tomato pest would be a turtle.

Dawn

I have seen more turtles this year than I have seen since I was a child. They aren't in my garden, but they seem to be on every road I travel.