Helping tomatoes to ripen. Saving the crop

[Deleted User]

I have decided to get on and harvest what I can, my plants are dripping with good sized tomatoes and day after day I am getting blight warnings. Most are under cover but only polythene with zipped doors, some are out in buckets against a wall and others are under an overhang.

They were all stopped at 4 trusses and I water every day and feed every two weeks. The fruits are looking great, I have strillo, which are small cherry and are ripening fast enough, they are outside, ferline have started ripening and a few are red, I ate one and it was nice with hardly any seeds and alicante but many of the fruits are very large and all are green

All the fruits look healthy and the ones outside are all strillo and some ferline, surprisingly the ferline outside are also starting to turn orange. I decided to try and speed things up a bit so am cutting off any remaining, unset tomato flowers and I have read that reducing water will help. I am going to cut off the ones that are orange to red and I will lay them on newspaper in a N facing room

I am getting quite twitchy about blight tbh and am reading about person after person losing all their plants both outdoors and in their greenhouses. I have applied damage limitation to other crops like my onions and potatoes and managed to preserve the whole crop. I have no intention of letting my tomatoes die on me. Has anyone else got any ideas?

Del_Astra

I prefer to feed twice a week at least, I half the amount it says "once a week" and fo it twice a week. I have no idea if it helps but I prefer the little and often feeding. You don't have to ripen on the vine, you can place them pick and place them on a sunny window sill indoors. Basically we need the sun, my crop has so far been poor compared to the previous years although I have avoided blight upto now.

lou2500

i always put the almost ready fruits on the windowsill so that the rest have more chance on the plant, they ripen just fine on the windowsill from the stage when they start to get a bit of colour on the plant you can pick them

Yorkie1

If you have to pick them, put them in a paper bag or similar (not plastic) with a ripe banana. It gives off ethylene, which is a gas which encourages ripening in other fruits.

This is why you get banana trees - so you don't put your bananas in the same fruit bowl as your other fruit and make it ripen too quickly.

Sambucus_Nigra

I picked all the toms off my outside plants 2 weeks ago as I was going away, and the little blighters grew twice as many when I wasn't looking. The main trick I find is simply taking each slightly blightly looking leaf off and disposing of it quietly. However, it can only take one windy or rainy day and the whole lot get it.

If you have some of reasonable size, I'd whip them off and put them with a nana as mentioned. But leave the plants until they DO actually get it. You never know...

demystified

So long as they're under cover and you only water at the roots you shouldn't have to worry about blight, it's plants exposed to the rain that get it as the spores are spread by splashing water.

[Deleted User]

I use growpots, even in the outside buckets and just water in the bottom layer, which keeps water off the stem. So far so good and the tomatoes are progressing well, although I am still being cautious and removing any that have turned orange. Ripening on removed tomatoes will not take place properly on a sunny cill as that can prevent the shoulders from getting red, as happened with my alicante last year, Ferline are ripening beautifully on a tray in the n facing room, just covered with one sheet of newspaper. I have sliced several and they are red from top to bottom all through

I have left alicante on the vines at the moment as they have just started turning, I am going to try and let them go all the way, unless we get lots of damp weather. We are eating home grown tomatoes every day now and I have dehydrated 9 trays of ripe red ferline slices in the excalibur