Impatient for those garden tomatoes to ripen?
There are effective methods to speed up the process.
Discover the 9 best ways to get your tomatoes red and ready.
Excited to enjoy fresh, ripe tomatoes sooner?
Let’s get started!
1. Enhance Airflow
Optimizing air flow is crucial not only for the health of your tomato plants but also for speeding up the ripening process.
Proper planning before planting can make a big difference; therefore, you should maintain adequate space between your plants.
The recommended spacing depends on the variety grown, but generally, allowing a minimum of 2 feet apart is advisable.
Also, enhancing air circulation involves prudent pruning practices.
By removing the lower leaves and branches, especially 8-18 inches from the base depending on the tomato type, you support a better airflow, which can reduce disease risk and promote faster ripening.
However, be cautious not to over-prune, as this can expose your fruits to Sun damage and disrupt their protective environment.
2. Water Appropriately
Proper hydration is key in nurturing healthy tomato plants without overdoing it. Y
our tomatoes demand consistent moisture to prevent fruit splitting and to encourage timely ripening.
Drowning your plants in water is just as damaging as neglect, stalling both growth and fruit development.
Aim to provide your tomatoes with roughly one inch of water every week, counting both rainfall and any additional watering.
To accurately gauge the hydration your tomatoes receive, use an unassuming household item—a tuna can.
Ensure it’s an inch deep and place it in the soil near your plants. After a week, measure the water level.
If the can isn’t full, it’s time to water your tomatoes. Conversely, if there’s overflow, you should cut back on watering.
For those using a drip irrigation system, position it so it drips directly into your can.
This way, you’ll ensure your tomatoes are receiving the perfect amount of water, pivotal for a bountiful and healthy harvest.
3. Use Controlled Water Stress
When cultivating tomatoes, careful water management is essential.
While overwatering can cause issues, a controlled decrease in watering may surprisingly benefit the maturation process.
Tomatoes, when faced with less water, prioritize fruit and seed production, ensuring their propagation.
By channeling their energy, tomatoes hasten the ripening of fruit, perhaps as a survival mechanism during drought.
Reducing the amount of water tomatoes receive can lead to more flavorful fruit. This doesn’t mean completely stopping irrigation; rather, it involves a careful moderation of water. Employ practices such as:
- Limiting additional watering: Start to gradually diminish the amount of water given.
- Relying on natural rainfall: In regions where showers are consistent, allow nature to provide necessary hydration.
This strategy encourages tomatoes to devote resources to developing seeds. However, it’s crucial to avoid excessive water deprivation to prevent harm to the plants.
4. Maintain Cool Conditions in Hot Weather
Maintaining a temperature range between 70 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit is crucial for the proper ripening of tomatoes.
Beyond this range, the ripening process slows until cooler conditions prevail. While altering outdoor temperatures is not within our control, we can employ strategies to mitigate heat effects on tomato plants.
Shading tomatoes is an effective method. Erecting a tarp above the plants can reduce direct sunlight exposure, aiding in temperature control. Removing surrounding vegetation that excessively traps heat can also be beneficial.
Using floating row covers provides another layer of protection, helping tomatoes remain at a lower temperature throughout peak heat periods. Thoughtful garden planning can preemptively reduce heat stress.
Positioning tomato plants in areas with 6 to 8 hours of direct sunlight can prevent overheating.
Consider integrating taller vegetation as natural sun shades. Sunflowers serve as excellent companions, providing necessary shade without compromising the tomatoes’ sunlight needs.
They can be an aesthetically pleasing and functional addition to your garden.
Be mindful that excessive sunlight rather than benefiting, can damage tomatoes, causing skin discolorations and increased susceptibility to rot.
On occasions where preventing heat exposure is impractical, patience is key; wait for the cooler temperatures to resume the ripening or opt to harvest tomatoes that are nearing maturity.
5. Keep Warm During Cold Weather
As autumn progresses, low temperatures can hinder tomatoes from ripening. To counter this, employing floating row covers at night is a tried-and-true method for keeping plants warm. These covers work wonders in the garden by trapping heat.
Should your garden experience an early frost, these covers can be lifesavers for your tomatoes. During extended periods of cool weather, it’s wise to gather unripe tomatoes and allow them to ripen indoors. This strategy ensures you won’t lose your crop to the cold and can enjoy ripe tomatoes despite outdoor temperatures.
6. Top Your Tomato Plants
In anticipation of an early frost, you may want to adopt a technique called topping for your indeterminate tomato plants. This practice involves cutting off the top part of the plants’ main stems, just above the last flower cluster.
It’s crucial to understand that this approach is suitable only for indeterminate tomato varieties, which continuously grow and produce fruit. On the other hand, determinate tomato plants have a predetermined harvest period after which they cease to set or develop new fruits.
7. Prune The Roots
Encouraging your tomatoes to ripen can be achieved through judicious root pruning—a technique that redirects the plants’ resources towards fruit maturation. When tomatoes experience this kind of stress, they prioritize the ripening process over new vegetative growth.
Consider this method carefully; it’s somewhat more adventurous than others. To safely experiment, apply it to just a couple of plants. Make sure the fruit clusters are almost mature before starting. Below is a guide to help you prune roots effectively:
- Always use sterile and sharp instruments such as a knife or a spade with a sharp point.
- Maintain a distance of roughly 12 inches from the stem’s base.
- Push your tool straight down into the soil.
- Your cutting tool should penetrate 8-10 inches deep underground, which is the expected length of robust roots at this stage.
- Gently carve a half-circle (“C” shape) around the plant.
When performed correctly, root pruning not only accelerates the ripening of tomatoes but can also enhance their taste.
8. Remove Unripe Fruits
If you thin out immature fruit from your plants, they can redirect their vitality toward maturing the remaining produce. This practice is particularly beneficial as the growing season wanes and the threat of an early frost looms. The young fruits that remain are unlikely to mature before the cold sets in.
Although it may seem that you’re forgoing a harvest of numerous tomatoes, this strategy promotes a quality yield over quantity. It’s a choice between having a store of mature, succulent tomatoes and a collection of small, undeveloped ones.
By choosing to thin, you ensure that the plant’s resources are concentrated on the fruits that are on the brink of ripening, optimizing the potential for a fruitful harvest.
Eager to get ripe tomatoes? Here’s a simple trick: pick mature but not fully ripe tomatoes and bring them inside to finish ripening.
You can use this method at any stage of growth to get more tomatoes. For example, after your first tomatoes mature, pick them so your plant can produce more flowers and fruits.
Tomatoes ripen faster off the vine. To make it work, only pick the ones that have started to ripen.
How do you know if a tomato is ripening?
- Color Check: All tomatoes are green initially. Dull green means not ready, while shiny green means they can ripen indoors.
- Squeeze Test: Hard tomatoes aren’t ready. Slightly soft ones are ripe enough to pick.
If you’re patient, you can wait until they show some red color before picking them.
Speed Up Ripening Indoors
Not all tomatoes ripen at the same time; it depends on the variety and how ripe they are when picked. Tomatoes with some red color will ripen faster than shiny green ones.
Tips for ripening indoors:
- Avoid the refrigerator: It stops the ripening process permanently. Instead, keep tomatoes on a counter away from direct sunlight.
- Use a paper bag: Place the picked tomatoes in a paper bag and fold the top over. Don’t overfill the bag; good air circulation helps the tomatoes ripen by enhancing the ethylene gas they release.
- Add other fruits: If you’re really impatient, put a banana or apple in the bag with the tomatoes. These fruits release extra ethylene gas, speeding up the process. But remember, just one banana or apple is enough.
You can also freeze your tomatoes, but wait until they are fully ripe before doing so.
Increase Your Yield by Speeding Up Ripening
Waiting for garden tomatoes to ripen can be tough. While we can’t make tomato season last all year, using these tips to speed up ripening means you’ll get delicious, homegrown tomatoes faster. Plus, you’ll extend the harvest season. Enjoy the full, rich flavor of your homegrown tomatoes—you’ve earned it!