Tomato woes — once again
Have you had that first juicy homegrown tomato yet? I’ve had only a handful of tomatoes from my 30 tomato plants thus far this season.
If you’re like me, anxiously watching those beautiful tomatoes and checking daily to see if they are ready, you are a bit frustrated.
Don’t worry, you are not alone. Many around Ohio are asking, “Why aren’t my tomatoes ripening?”
As with many other problems this season, the culprit is the weather. Despite the fact that tomatoes like warm sunny days, of which we have had plenty, they don’t like warm or hot nights.
Fortunately, this season has been pretty good for leaf diseases. We have had warm weather and low humidity and dew at night that has not allowed for the development of some of the leaf spot diseases.
During the last four years, we have had perfect conditions for these diseases to develop and lead to premature leaf drop and eventual sunscalding or sunburn of any remaining tomatoes on the vine.
This year the vines are looking pretty good, and for the most part, the tomatoes look pretty good too. However, they just aren’t ripening.
The optimum temperature for tomatoes to ripen is 70 to 75 degrees. This is the best time for lycopene and carotene to develop. These are the pigments that give the fruit its color.
With temperatures between 85 to 90 degrees, these pigments aren’t produced and thus fruit doesn’t ripen. Another vegetable specialist I was talking with also suggested that at high night temperatures, the plants are putting a lot of energy into taking care of themselves (foliage). Therefore, they can’t expend energy for creating lycopene and carotene for fruit ripening.
Some of these recent and upcoming temperatures may lead to better ripening. Of course, then I will have hundreds of ripe tomatoes all at once, right? I am not complaining — I’ll find something do to with them.
The other weather-related problem for developing tomatoes is dry soil. If you haven’t been keeping your tomatoes irrigated or you haven’t received any of these heavy pop-up showers, you will likely see cracking of the tomatoes when it rains.
Tomatoes are 95% water. When it’s dry, water levels are low. If the plant receives a large amount of rain all at once, the skin can’t take it and cracks.
These fruits are still OK to eat, but if you don’t harvest them right away, insects start feeding on them.
As I said, I’m not complaining. I am truly happy that my plants look good this year and I have lots of green tomatoes. Fried green tomatoes are also quite good! Pamela Corle-Bennett is the state master gardener volunteer coordinator and horticulture educator for Ohio State University Extension. Contact her by email at bennett.27@osu.edu.